Whoa~~ Well after seeing todays 118 Plants OFF LINE & MINIMUM 55% UNPLANNED OUTAGES. Or Worse if you use all the plants that initally were unplanned Outages & show Planned outages you get a STAGGERING 67% UNPLANNED OUTAGES. GEE COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE Y2K RELATED!!! YAH RIGHT http://www.caiso.com/docs/09003a6080/0d/18/09003a60800d1856.html

I Didn't include LADWP or SMUD. See link for yourself!! Geno-Ca

-- Geno-Ca (headturbo@hotmail.com), April 09, 2001

Answers

Some of the outages, esp. in the past, likely have been directly Y2K embedded system failure related. Due to these outages, remaining power plants must work harder. This causes the overall failure and outage rate to rise, long term. Hence, many other failures, (and an increasing percentage in the future) are "cascading effect" outages, not directly Y2K Bug caused, but due to the effects of previous Y2K caused outages.

The evidence of Y2K as a cause of outages is strong, especially for the last "wave," on Dec. 31 2000, when some embedded systems didn't recognize that Year "00" has 366 days. This is a variant of the Leap Year Date Bug, not the Century Date Bug. The reason Dec. 31 was a trouble date for the Leap Year Date Bug is because some systems use a three digit day field and a two digit year field, and no month field. Hence, the "Leap Year Date Bug" day of month 02 day 29 year 00 was simply day 060 year 00; and no problem hit at that time. Instead, the Leap Year Date Bug hit these systems by rolling over from day 365 year 00 to day 001 year 01, bypassing day 366 year 00.

Stage three alerts and the first "rolling blackouts" didn't hit California until shortly after this "last wave" of Y2K hit. All summer long in 2000, Stage 2 was the worst it got. Since there was no problem at all in 1999, the circumstantial evidence is that the Century Date and/or the Leap Year Date Bug (as generally then understood) did cause some failures. I do know that line voltage was unstable shortly after Rollover (in San Diego), evidence of at least instances of manual override grid operation. So the Century Date Bug did cause at least mild problems. But no observable effects appeared until summer, when a shortage of electricity materialized in CA for the first time.

The circumstantial evidence shows this: Since much attention was focused on the Century Date Bug, and the "first" Leap Year Date Bug was also widely known, remediation was largely successful, keeping the failure rate low. But some remediation efforts apparantly missed the "second" Leap Year Date Bug. Hence, it "blindsided" us with a surprisingly high failure rate.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), April 10, 2001.

We had some industry "insiders" posting in '99. Are they still around?

-- John Littmann (LITTMANNJOHNTL@AOL.COM), April 10, 2001.