NERC analysis by R Cowles

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I haven't seen anyone reference this so I will post it for your consideration. The NERC data is an important peek into how things are going even if there is lots of 'spin' in the report conclusion. Rick Cowles has done an outstanding job in evaluating the raw data. Please read his analysis. My conclusion is fairly grim.

Cowle's NERC rpt



-- RD. ->H (drherr@erols.com), January 26, 1999

Answers

I just finished reading Cowles' pre-NERC report, and if 10% of the reporters in this country would have done the legwork that he did, the headlines would have been much different. But there I go expecting journalists to actually RESEARCH a story instead of accepting the PR spin at face value... Quick, somebody slap me to my senses!

-- Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com), January 26, 1999.

Yes, an excellent analysis by Mr. Cowles, as usual.

I suspect that the real danger lies in the possibility that many power companies might be relying extensively on type (sample) testing and vendor statements for assessing/testing embedded systems, especially in their transmission and distribution systems. Anyone familiar with the work of Frautschi and others on embedded systems knows that such "methodologies" for assessing embedded systems can be disturbingly unreliable. Seemingly identical embedded systems can have quite different individual chips within them; vendor statements can be inaccurate. The NERC report briefly recognizes this danger when it advises power companies to check in their distribution systems every individual embedded component whose failure would cause an outage. One presumes that the same strategy should be followed when assessing embedded systems in generating plants and transmission systems. The question is, how many power companies are doing it?

-- Don Florence (dflorence@zianet.com), January 27, 1999.


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