The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article out about the progress of Peco Energy Co. The good news is that Peco seems to be addressing the problem thoroughly. The bad news is that Peco hasn't spent much of its projected Y2K budget yet.

Title, link and two quotes from The Inquirer article:

"Electricity industry optimistic about 2000"

http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Feb/16/front_page/ELEC16.htm

[snip]

A small outage could cause a bigger one. And that is why Peco is spending $75 million to check its infrastructure for problems that could turn the lights out.

The project has been an eye-opening experience said Dave Hoefner, Y2K project manager.

"We retired and replaced over one-half of the [software and hardware] portfolio we had two years ago," Hoefner said. "We have uncovered systems we did not know existed; discovered external software that is mission-critical....We had many suppliers whose documentation said they were Y2K compliant and they failed our tests."

[snip]

Peco's $75 million Y2K budget is three times its earlier estimate. It had spent about $21 million of that through the end of 1998.

[snip]

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), February 17, 1999

Answers

Money is a very poor metric for a remediation project, esp. this one. You may find fewer problems than first estimated, or more problems. And you want something left at the end of the year for fixing things you may have missed. So money spent doesn't really have much meaning.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), February 17, 1999.

Paul,

Your point about percentage of money spent so far sounds reasonable. What do you think about the fact that their estimated budget for the project has tripled?

-- Kevin (mixesmusic@worldnet.att.net), February 17, 1999.

I doubt that a tripling of the estimated budget is much more significant than the underspend (of what? The original or the tripled budget? The latter would indicate clearly why they tripled it!)

Any such budget is a guess. The only way to have fitted Y2K into conventional yearly budgeting would have been to have started years ago, like maybe in 1990. I wonder if anyone ever managed to use that as leverage? (Doubt it).

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), February 17, 1999.

Kevin, I saw this article in the printed paper yesterday , and was surprised. Front page no less, this is a first for the Inquirer which has been quite about Y2K.

As pshannon pointed before on a similar article in another paper, this one plays with readers habits of reading only headlines and front page paragraphs. "Electricity industry optimistic about 2000". Not until you go to page 9 do you read statements such as "I think we're no longer at the point of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions, but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions will be," said Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) at a hearing in June of the special Senate committee on the Year 2000.

Sen. Robert Bennett (R., Utah), chairman of the committee, fears there will be scattered outages, most likely in areas served by rural cooperatives. "It's obvious . . . that the industry still has the bulk of its heavy lifting ahead of itself," says Don Meyer, spokesman for the Senate committee." and "Computer consultant Rick Cowles, author of a book on Y2K and the electric industry, says the North American Electric Reliability Council's public statements are more upbeat than warranted by the data submitted by its members." and ""They've got an obvious vested interest in putting the best foot forward," Cowles said. "The Dow Jones utility index would probably take a pretty good hit if [ the council ] came out and said we've got some problems here, we're not sure we're going to meet our goals."

Nonetheless, I was impressed by the article as a whole. It supported what I have been saying to my husband all along with printed articles from this forum. He's aware of the positive spin campaign, and this article did not deny my efforts.

"Unlike water and natural gas, electricity cannot be stored on a large scale. There is little that consumers or businesses can do to prepare for the possibility of a blackout, aside from buying a generator or stocking up on flashlight batteries and candles."

That's pretty strong, coming from the Inquirer. We've been kept in the dark until now. Y2K is not talked about in this region.

-- Chris (catsy@pond.com), February 17, 1999.