Jon Arnold of Edison Electric Institute stated on a panel presentation at the National Press Club on Aug 18 1998 that the only problems found thus far by power companies were "nuisance items"

Does anyone have any conflicting info in regards to this?

-- tj (toddjk@aa.net), September 19, 1998

Answers

These happy face reports amaze me. As of this date, not one utility in the country can declare itself Y2K compliant or ready. The few large scale tests done have ended in failure. (see y2knews.com for relevant story on the August test of a Swedish nuclear plant) Also see US News and World Report/June for US offline test report. The NERC report while "cautiously optimistic" shows that over half of the surveyed plants haven't even finished assessment. Twentyfive percent wouldn't even respond to the survey (and 98% of all US electric utilities belong to this org). Until you take a plant off grid and run end to end system tests, you don't know what will happen, period. Go to Gary North's Latest reports and read Senator Bennett's report on utilities then stock up on fuel and blankets.

-- R. D..Herring (drherr@erols.com), September 19, 1998.

I recommend referencing Dick Mills' columns at the Westergaard site (I forget the specific address). He states that the power system is indeed fragile. For example, one of the largest power outages (I believe within the last 10 years) was found to be caused by a limb taking down one power line. However, he states that when the electric industry is aware of the coming storm (1/1/00) that the grid should be prepared to handle the overload appropriately, i.e. requesting voluntary shutdowns of manufacturing sites.

-- bhayes (bkhayes@intellex.com), September 20, 1998.

The good news is that we probably can count on at least 40 to 50% of the USA generating capacity to go through OK. The bad news is that quite a bit of what won't run will be pollution control equipmemt. Since we never run at more than 70-80% capacity, due to maintainence needs, this means shortages but not complete blackout. Now the worse news - getting replacement parts to fix the problems may take quite a while. Why? The chip and PLC manufacturers are at the top end of a long 'food chain' of essential suppliers. It will take quite a while to get new parts if they have to be manufactured and not taken from stock. Still, I am hearing about several slow movements to order possible replacements for non Y2K compliant parts ahead of time, so there is quite a lot of hope. Now, someone is going to want to know how I get that 40-50% figure. Simple! I just took the approximate percentage of power plants built before 1975. (From memory, I admit) For those plants, pollution controls, automatic belt controls, and so on are add-ons that can be dispensed with. Last time I was in the Paradise Power Plant (TVA) they still had all the hand controls ready to override and run. Can't override a new (mid 80's and later)plant that way because there never were any hand controls. But hardly any one removes them later (probably some exceptions) since the automatic add-ons can go out, and you already have hand control overrides installed to fall back on. So I am a whole lot more confident about the LOCAL power situation than a lot of folks. Now if you live somewhere 300 miles from a power plant, and you go through a half dozen automatic switches and transformers to get back to the regional grid, you may have a problem, and I would advise you to plan for some outages. But not everything in the world depends on PLC's. CIAO

Paul

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), September 20, 1998.

This continues the thread about failures occuring on New Year's Eve since te text was displaying incorrectly over there.

Guys, stop being so sure that power will immediately stop: granted it might, but more likely (and nobody knows) is things won't change immediately at the stroke of midnight at any particular time zone or in any particular utility.

Consider these "thumb" rules about Y2K: - a LOT more people are going to become aware of the problem over the next 14 months, - these people will begin studying the problem, - no (honest) person, programmer, or manager has ever studied the problem and become "less" concerned, or become "more" complacent, than they were before they studied the problem (This does leave out: liars, most politicians, the media, and those who listen to the media; but you can fool some of the people all of the time anyway...) - these people are going to begin getting real worried (define "real" to various degrees) and will increase pressure to "fix" things and fund "fixes" and "live tests" in their corporations and utilities. - so there will be substantial pressure for progress, and a lot of actual progress in remediation between now and 2000. (The politicians will probably take credit for all of the progress however.)

Make a wild assumption that "most" critical programs are fixed: this leaves about 7% that will still fail - but they will fail randomly, and some (most) of these failures are "business" related: buying, ordering, billing, shipping, inventories, etc. So **all** actual utility distribution will probably not be affected immediately by the remaining undiscobvered program faults, and by the insertion of new bugs when others are corrected.

Assume the biggest problem **that can't be solved** between now and the troubles is embedded controllers.

But we also "know" some (but not all) controllers are affected. Some of these will fail. The critical controllers will most likely either freeze open, freeze as-is, or freeze shut. With a time dilation effect, some will go stupid over a period of time, but still may be somewhat acurate at the beginning.

So, in my humble wild a*s guessing opnion (IHWAGO), it is most likely that failures won't happen until something changes to upset the delicate balance of existing systems:

For example: 15 minutes after the Times Square celebration when 10 million toilets are simultaneously flushed in the Eastern Time Zone. Then TSHTF.

-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), September 20, 1998.

A factor mot previously mentioned on this thread is the reliance of coal-fired plants on railroads for delivery of more coal. If railroads are seriously affected by Y2k bugs, and capacity is thus reduced, some power plants could eventually run out of coal. Since coal-fired generating plants typically have a 6 week inventory of coal, they could run out weeks or months later.

Also not mentioned is the possibility that some nuclear plants could be shut down for safety reasons by the NRC. <<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>....

-- Dan Hunt (dhunt@hostscorp.com), September 21, 1998.

Dan:

I got an email a couple weeks ago from someone in southern WI. He had attended a Y2K briefing by the public utilities there. (I'm not sure which ones, since I live farther north.) They stated that they had 90-100 days coal reserves on hand at their facilities. If this is true, that would get them through the worst of winter without even a single shipment.

There is another thread here which mentioned communications links and their importance to power generation and distribution. According to the briefing mentioned above, these utilities have private microwave links (which they claim are Y2K compliant), and would still be able to communicate even if the telcos were down.

One last thing - there seems to be much worry about the nukes. From what I've heard, they would be less likely to fail, since many of them use analog controls. I can't remember where I heard it, but one source said that no nukes have been lisenced in the U.S. in the last 20 years. That would point to the use of more analog controls.

Since I have no first-hand knowledge of any of these things, all I can do is speculate, and try to make decisions based on what I hear. I believe there will be electric power problems, and am preparing for them. Just how bad they will be.......who knows....

-- Mike (gartner@execpc.com), September 21, 1998.

I am almost getting convinced that the supposed Y2K induced threat regarding nuclear facilities -- like the much publicized planes-falling-from-the-skies hype -- is just a red herring thrown out to obsure the Y2K issue. Every reliable source that I know of says that the nuclear facilities are SAFE, that Y2K will not cause any kind of nuclear accidents, due to analog machinery and manual operations that these plants have, as well as very tight safety regulations that call for closing them if there is any question (e.g., if communications are not functional, a nuclear plant must close). THIS IS THE REAL Y2K ISSUE -- whether these plants will be permitted to operate in the Y2K impacted environment. Continuing to see press reports happily stating (factually) that there is no chance of a Y2K induced nuclear accident (nor planes falling from the skies) just muddies the waters (purposely?).

-- Joe (shar@pei.com), September 22, 1998.