For its March 2010 issue, The Electricity Journal published an article By Levi McAllister and Kelly L. Dawson titled "Restoring Faith in the Bulk-Power System: An Early Assessment of Mandatory Reliability Standards."
Abstract:
The driving force underlying creation of mandatory reliability standards was the prevention of widespread outages, such as those that occurred in 1965, 1977 and 2003. So far, no similar outage has occurred when an entity is in full compliance with the standards, and NERC and FERC have demonstrated that they will actively enforce compliance while aggressively pursuing entities alleged to be non-compliant.