Reliability: Reality or the Power Engineers' Last Gasp

Power systems reliability in North America has been defined largely (if not entirely) by engineers and in engineering terms. The NERC and the regional reliability councils have traditionally been the writers of the rules and the enforcers of the requirements. Their decisions have been based on increasingly refined engineering rules of thumb that have stressed conservative measures of system security over economic rationality. Does this make sense in a restructured world in which reliability may be relative for different customers and for different