FERC Order 888 Audit Trail Checklist (PROV-O Edition)

FERC Order No. 888 (1996) established rules for non-discriminatory open access to electric transmission networks, requiring utilities to functionally separate transmission operations from generation and sales—and to maintain transparent, auditable records of scheduling, curtailment, and congestion management decisions. The PROV-O Edition extends this mandate into modern AI-driven grid infrastructure by translating regulatory audit requirements into formal provenance expressions using the W3C PROV-O vocabulary (e.g., prov:Activity, prov:Entity, prov:wasGeneratedBy, prov:wasAttributedTo). Each forecasting model inference, data ingestion event, or dispatch recommendation must be represented as a PROV-O-compliant traceable activity, capturing agents (e.g., 'ISO-CAISO-AI-Engine-v2.1'), inputs (e.g., 'NOAA-GFS-20240521T12Z'), transformations (e.g., 'bias-correction-algorithm-ENSO-adjusted'), and outputs (e.g., '72h-solar-irradiance-forecast-CAISO-ZONE4'). This enables automated conformance checking via SPARQL queries against triplestores, supports cross-jurisdictional interoperability, and satisfies both FERC’s recordkeeping obligations (18 CFR § 35.26) and NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) traceability criteria. Implementation requires integration with time-series databases, ML metadata stores (e.g., MLflow + PROV-O exporters), and digital twin platforms to ensure end-to-end provenance capture from sensor ingestion through real-time market dispatch.