MRO is one of eight regional entities in North America operating under their delegated authority from regulators in the United States and Canada. In their respective regions, each regional entity is responsible for: 1) developing and implementing reliability standards; 2) enforcing compliance with those standards; 3) providing seasonal and long-term assessments of the bulk power system’s ability to meet demand for electricity; and 4) providing an appeals and dispute resolution process.

The MRO region covers roughly one million square miles spanning the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the states of North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and the majority of the territory in the states of South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin. The region includes more than 100 organizations that are involved in the production and delivery of power to more than 20 million people. These organizations include municipal utilities, cooperatives, investor-owned utilities, a federal power marketing agency, Canadian Crown Corporations, independent power producers and others who have interests in the reliability of the bulk power system.

MRO was formed in 2002 and began operations in 2005. MRO was organized with a balanced stakeholder board with independent oversight to ensure that the standards developed and enforced by MRO are fair and administered without undue influence from participants. MRO assumed the reliability functions of the Mid-Continent Area Power Pool (MAPP) and Mid-America Interconnected Network (MAIN), both former voluntary regional reliability councils.