Can anyone provide information, confirmed or otherwise, as to the general status of California and the relative strength/weakness of the Western Grid? Having studied this issue for a few months I realize that these are very broad questions. Nonetheless, if anyone has had any real world experiences with California utilities and the Western Interconnection, I would welcome even hearsay information.

I am an analyst at a major refiner. We are currently assessing our risk from dirty power and/or power interruptions. Any information you can provide would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 1999

Answers

Jim,

Take a look at this previous thread in the forum (just click on the link), and some of the references from that set of postings. This should help you out a bit in your risk assessment.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0002 BQ

Also, I would expect that your refinery is on an interruptible contract with your power provider. Consider that merely the prospect of capacity problems as a result of Y2k issues increases the risk that your refinery, as a major power consumer, will be one of the first loads shed if available capacity becomes an issue.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 1999

Thanks for the quick response. I have read up on the Western outage and the Ice Storm back east. These two events are what lead me into this topic. PUC's lame explanation and subsequent findings on thier "scattered outage" lead me to believe their will be signifigant problems. I am specifically looking for inside information on the individual generators within the interconnection.

For example, I spoke to a Y2K author recently who had an APS (Arizona) engineer admit to him that they (APS) are aware that they WILL fail on Jan 1. Their plan is to try to restart within 7 days. The engineer allegedly told the author that if they didn't restart within 3 days, he was heading for the hills. While this information is hearsay, it gives me great pause. Being from the commodities industry, I usually buy the rumor and sell the fact. Thanks again for the prompt feedback.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 1999

Jim - I attended the Feb 24th joint committee y2k hearings at the Capitol in Sacramento. The following outlines the various testimonies.

ISO lines were upgraded in the last 4 years and are guaranteed to be compliant by mfgr. It was not mentioned if the ISO system has been tested.

Sub-ISO grid structure was considered potentially problematical, but there was not much hard info brought to light because, primarily, of PG&E's extreme reluctance to give out info. All of PG&E's PUC paperwork is stamped Confidential making it impossible for even the Senators and Assemblypeople on the pertainent committees to get the info. Interestingly, SoCalEdison (I think that is the other big PowerCo. :-), and their y2k efforts and disclosures in this area were not brought up.

Generators and facilities are being considered ok for the most part. The Nuke plants were not even on Calif's radar on Feb 24th, they are attempting to find out the status from NRC. Conventionally fueled generator facilities have the usual potential fuel supply problems, nothing was said re stockpiling of fuel. Hydro generators would be impacted if the hydrological management system snafus. DWR was not represented so there was no testimony about their status.

Industry was represented by Intel. Mr. Richard Hall, in both his testimony and in subsequent questioning, made it very clear that Intel gave little credence to the NERC reports. He stated that Intel's method of getting reliable info was to approach the highest ranking PowerCo person who would talk to them re y2k. Intel considers info gathered this way to be of much higher reliability. When questioned re PG&E Mr. Hall intimated PG&E stonewalls. When asked if PG&E would guarantee juice when Intel spoke to them, he said "No."

Home generator safety was brought up. In light of the testimony the committee instructed the Office of Emergency Services to poll Calif's Fire and Police Depts re whether or not each has generators and fuel (I believe the poll results have been posted several weeks ago on Yourdan), then a decision was to be made as to acquisition of the generators and fuel.

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PG&E did have a Y2k flier in Feb's billing which stated they are working on it, but no guarantees, so you may want to prepare. SoCalEd did recommend that people prepare, am not sure if that recommendation still stands given the heat they received.

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Two men, 20 & 24 year PG&E careerists, doing field work, both told me they are privately preparing for electrical problems lasting several months. Both men consider embedded systems THE big area of concern. When I outlined the Western Grid Contingency Plan to these guys they nodded their head in agreement to all of the points until I brought up the part of the plan where it addresses re-establishing power to grid areas. The one guy with the most expertise in that area just broke out laughing. He then spent 5 minutes outlining physically the steps it takes & said he considered "manual" re-establishment to be absurd. - fwiw

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A friend is engaged in embedded system remediation in one of PG&E's accounts receivable billing centers. Officially, everything will be up and running prior to y2k. The people doing the actual work think that they will have the systems fully operational mid-summer 2000.

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A friend, long time career programmer for DWR, (Dept of Water Resources), said that DWR was in a state of disarray. DWR controls not only the hydrological activity, monitoring, pumping, dams, canals, etc., but they also control electrical grid feeds from hydro generators in many cases.

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A small, privately owned, local hydro generator facility has done no y2k work. They feed into the local grid.

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-- Anonymous, April 23, 1999

Jim, I'd suggest you might find it interesting to do a site search here (link at the top of the New Questions page) for "PG&E" and read all the links which come up. There's a particularly interesting hot link to a San Francisco news article on the "PUC Blasts PG&E" thread. It's not Y2K related, but the regular operations of any utility might be worth considering.

I don't think you're going to get any verifiable negative "inside information" posted here; if anyone did want to relay such info to you, they would do it by private e-mail for obvious legal reasons. Based on the hearsay you mentioned, I did check APS's most recent SEC filing (their 10K) and compared it to the previous 10Q Year 2000 statement. In the 10Q statement for their project status as of Sept. 30, 1998, they did not give any estimations of the percent of remediation or testing done. They did state, "..the Company has inventoried and assessed all IT and non-IT systems.." In the 10K filing, APS states they are 70% complete with the remediation and testing of critical systems as of Jan.31, 1999. There was a modification to their statement about the inventory and assessment, "We have inventoried and assessed essentially all mission critical IT and non-IT systems and equipment." I hate words like "essentially" being added to a prior straightforward statement, but that might be the advice of a legal rep.

Otherwise, their "most reasonably likely worst case scenario" (intermittent loss of power) was unchanged as was almost all of the rest of the latest report, except for costs spent to date rising by $500,000 in the four month interval. They still project completion of critical systems by June 30, except for what can only be done during a scheduled outage at Palo Verde in the last half of this year.

Those of you in the commodities analyses field must be burning the midnight oil lately. I just had an e-mail from someone else in the commodities field in London who reads this forum and who's also trying to "tease out" implications. I wish good luck to all of you who are trying to get a handle on the odds of what will happen.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 1999

Jim,

(and everyone) I know it is frustrating to hear unsubstantiated, unreferenced information, but here goes anyway:

I live in the San Francisco Bay area. My cousin does as well. She has a friend who is a Y2K Project Manager for PG&E. This manager told my cousin to buy a generator.

Enough said.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 1999

Jim: Re the CA power situation: I was told that the latest report that PG&E submitted to the CA PUC has every page stamped "Confidantial". and that CA PUC had to initiate a new rulemaking to make such submissions out of order. Have not checked this out yet.

As you may know, almost no state PUCs (sometimes called PSCs) are regulating vigorously re y2k -- most are just ducking, at best requiring superficial reports from the utilities.

For example the only one I know about which is doing Independent Verification and Validation (IVV) of regulated utilities is CT PUC -- and they hired the retired CIO's of the utilities. So while the industry expertise is there, one has to wonder about the independence...what we don't need is more PR/reassurance exercises.

The federal UK government is doing independent audits of gas, water, and power utilities, I understand, and the telecom companies are rushing to audit each other...

Such IVV is one of only two major mechanisms I know of that stand a chance in this period of y2k work of getting accurate information from life-and-death infrastructure providers, the other being increasingly sophisticated grilling of such folks by the public at public forums (which probably only local and state governments can hold effectively)... Fred

-- Anonymous, April 25, 1999

I talked with the city Fire dept. chief. He said that after the 10th day if power isn't restored, then water tanker trucks will deliver water "as per the agreements already set up". hope somebody stores the diesel for this.

-- Anonymous, April 27, 1999