Can we believe the responses to surveys, the public statements made by major utilities, or the comments made by upper management regarding their y2k repair progress? The following report from the recent Boston conference might give us a hint.

Two weeks ago I posted a c.s.y2k report from "Mickey" who works for a large power generation utility. This was a 'good news' report: he basically felt that his own company was in good shape.

Since that time he's attended a conference in Boston. This is his report of that conference. This is the 'bad news' report. I have edited the post to delete the name of a specific utility.

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Hi All,

Well, I'm back from beantown. We had a lot more people show up than anyone expected. We had representatives from 18 PGs (all either medium or large in size). These were either employees or the PGs themselves, employees of third parties doing the remediation (i.e. IBM, EDS, D&T...), and consultants working on these projects. All attendees were in the technical end of the spectrum (no PHMs). Friday night was devoted to handshaking and getting-to-know-you chatter. The real fun began on saturday.

The topics on the agenda were:

1. Code remediation methods 2. Data aging 3. Plants remediation and embedded processors 4. Contingency issues

I really wish I could say that this event left me all warm and fuzzy. It didn't. Once again I was left with the feeling that the major PGs don't really care if they can generate and deliver power, if they can't bill for it. As to billing for it, a large percentage of these companies use Arthur Andersen's CSS or Customer/1 (same fish, different newspaper). This package is purported to be compliant as delivered. All users add they're own mods, and therefore feel the need to test for compliance (as if the vendors word would have been enough!!). As we are currently testing the same system at SoCo, it was of particular interest to me. The type of thing I heard made me pray that they hadn't modified it past the point of compliancy. Here's a little example of the kind of things I heard:

XYZ Company has certified their CSS system as compliant. When I asked about their aging strategy, I received an e-mail consisting of an Excel workbook. CSS if rife with dates. Most of these are DB2 dates, and as such, present no problem in aging. There are, however, 182 derivative dates. These are partial dates, defined to the database as Character(4). They contain dates in formats such as YYMM, MMYY, MMDD, etc. The problem with aging these dates is that if you wish to age a date such as 0998 (MMYY) 45 days, what month do you arrive at. If one assumes (there's that word again) that the "DAY" portion of this date was a "01", then one arrives at 1098. If, however, this date was a partial date, derived from a DB2 dates such as '1998-08-17', and was aged 45 days, then the correct derivative is 1198. Just to cloud the issue (as if it needed clouding), some of the base dates from which the partials are derived have sentinel values (0001-01-01, 9999-12-31). In reviewing the actual production data, I found that some of the derived dates had valid values, even though the base DB2 date had a sentinel value. I asked Com-Ed how they handle this anomoly. Their response was that they eliminated these type of records from the testing scheme. What the did was to dummy up some data, arbitrarily decide which fields to age (based on whether they could determine its origin), and called it compliant. The really frightening part is that they spent 50 days going through this fudged aging. I heard similar stories from most of the other PGs. If this is an example of their testing and aging strategy, they are dead men walking.

Next. Plant remediation. After lots of chatter and bs, the net of this was that lots of these nimrods are actually in a fix-on-failure mode. Oh, they are doing testing all right. Just not the kind that has any value, unless the goal is to be able to say that "Well, we tested it and it worked fine at the time". In other words, their goal is to avoid litigation, not to ensure the flow of power. Now, I am not going to paint all with the same broad brush. Suffice it to say I heard enough to make me sure that the national grid won't be there after 2000-01-01. To those PGs that were taking the matter of plant remediation seriously, I asked the obvious question, which brings to the last topic,

Remediation. I inquired to all as to the nature of their contingency plans. The general response was one of "In contingency for what?". Even those PGs that had plans, these plans were of the nature of what to do internally should one of their plants fail. Not once did I hear mention of plans to take their generator off the grid and maintain the supply of power to their customers. I also didn't hear of any plans to refire their nuke should they be forced to shut down. The problem here, as has been discussed before, is that it takes a tremendous amount of power to fire up a cold core. Smart money would do something like running a direct wire from a hydro or fossil plant that is known to be compliant to the nearby nuke. This would allow the full output of the plant to be used to restart the nuke. In this scenario, it is possible to restart a cold core in under 24 hours (we have proved this). When I mentioned this to my contemporaries (term used loosely), I was met with lots of confused looks, as if to say "Now why would one go and do that".

The short of it all is that, imho, if you don't live in the southwest, it is likely to be a dark New Years Day.

Wish it were better news, but it ain't

mickey

Your thoughts, please.... Bertin Opus

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1998

Answers

Note: The report was provided by Rocky Knolls at the Ed Yourdon forum. I mistakenly ommitted that in my cut and paste effort. Bertin

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1998

I think the answer is no. Also Anderson does not certify C/1 as being Y2k compliant. Too many utilities take the above attitude that they need to take care of their mainframes and forget about generating and distribution.

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1998