GridEx VIII 2025

This event is scheduled for Tuesday, November 18th at 10am to Wednesday, November 19th at 5pm ET.

Welcome to GridEx VIII 2025 Training Registration Page

* Note – this is not for NERC Certified System Operator Continuing Education Hours

NERC will be conducting its eighth sector-wide grid security exercise, GridEx VIII, in November 2025. GridEx VIII is designed to exercise the resilience of the North American electricity system in the face of a coordinated attack from a nation-state adversary. The first grid security exercise took place in November 2011 and has continued to occur every other year, providing an opportunity for asset owners and operators across North America to test their incident response plans and operational preparedness. These geographically distributed exercises were designed to execute the electricity sector's crisis response to simulated coordinated cybersecurity and physical security threats and incidents, to strengthen utilities' crisis response functions, and to provide input for lessons learned. GridEx VIII is scheduled for November 18-19, 2025.

For more information, please visit this event overview.

Objectives

The objectives for GridEx VIII are:

• Validate incident, operating, communications, mutual assistance, and crisis management response plans.
• Respond to both emerging and imminent cyber and physical threats with the potential to impact the operational reliability of the grid.
• Provide an opportunity to coordinate with state/provincial, local, and federal governments, suppliers supporting critical operations, and industry partners to facilitate response and recovery efforts.
• Provide an opportunity to coordinate with interdependent critical infrastructure sectors, such as natural gas, telecommunications, water/wastewater.
• Practice engagement between owner-operators during a large-scale incident to coordinate response efforts across the RC Area.
• Document current state of communications technology, and identify areas to build resilience in the Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency (PACE) communications methodology at regional, national, and international levels during crisis response and communications system failures.

Training

GridEx VIII is a training opportunity for industry stakeholders to take part in the exercise from their place of work over two days and receive sequenced exercise injects and interact with exercise tools that detail simulated scenario conditions. Based on this information, participants will respond with simulated internal and external information sharing activities, as well as practice and review internal response procedures. An exercise control cell, based in the Washington, D.C. area, will manage the distributed play, monitor the exercise, and gather lessons learned.

Register Now

This registration page is for those Individuals who wish to track Continuing Education Hours for industry related certifications, not NERC Certified System Operator Certification credits. Many IT, physical security, business continuity, and disaster response certifications have ongoing CEH requirements that align with the objectives and learning activities of this exercise. In addition, most industry certifications require the submission of audit records to support an individual's ongoing certification renewal process. This event registration page has been established for players to register and then obtain a certificate of participation record. Please Register now if you would like a downloadable certificate of participation.