(This seems worthy of repeating. Rick, still no comment?) Utilities Say They're Y2K Ready, Though Blackouts Expected, June 30, 1999

http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0011fE

(Bloomberg) -- Most U.S. utilities said today that their power plants and transmission lines are ``Y2K ready,'' though experts still expect some power failures when the New Year comes.

Utilities were asked to report their level of ``readiness'' to the North American Electric Reliability Council today. While a full report on the results won't be ready until July 29, dozens of utilities declared their success at finding and eliminating the Millennium bug. Electric utilities spent billions of dollars over the past several years to prepare for the day when aging computer and analog systems can't determine whether the digits ``00'' represent the year 1900 or 2000. They've been upgrading and testing components of power plants and distribution systems, and setting up contingency plans in case of failures.

``Utilities are scared,'' said Cameron Daley, chief operating officer of Framingham, Massachusetts-based Tava/R.W. Beck, which tested and upgraded systems for more than 100 U.S. utilities. ``The whole grid won't collapse, but there will be outages that could last up to several weeks.''

While no utility has guaranteed there won't be blackouts Jan. 1, industry groups said utilities are doing everything they can to prevent problems, including preparing for the worst.

``We believe Y2K won't be a problem,'' said Eugene Gorzelnik, a spokesman for the council. ``There will be a huge backlash if a utility reports it's Y2K ready, and it turns out that it wasn't.'' Edison International's Southern California Edison utility, which has spent $72 million on Y2K preparation, said it plans to dispatch an extra 500 employees on New Year's Eve. Wisconsin Energy Corp.'s Wisconsin Electric Power Co. plans to have as much as 50 percent more electricity available than it normally needs at that time of year.

Still, deregulation has pushed utilities to cut labor and other costs, and those that are deepest in negotiations with regulators haven't been as focused on preventing problems related to the millennium bug, Daley said.

``The utilities most distracted by deregulation aren't doing enough to identify and prevent problems,'' Daley said. ``There are a number of instances where utilities didn't go deep enough into their systems -- they accepted vendors' words that parts of a system were compliant.'' Even if a utility corrects all the problems in its own system, power still may be cut off to their customers. That's because U.S. and Canadian power lines connect all utilities, and when one utility system breaks down, it could cause problems for others.

``We cannot provide warranties (against blackouts) because our readiness depends in part on other parties,'' said Samuel Manno, director of Niagara Mohawk Power Corp.'s Y2K project.

At the trade council's suggestion, utilities agreed to conduct the first major test of the entire power systems' ability to properly recognize dates beyond 1999 on September 9.

``We hope to learn what still needs to be done at that point and correct any glitches before they happen,'' Gorzelnik said.

-- Mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 29, 1999

Answers

Rick Cowles did respond yesterday to a question I had as to whether he still believed that outages were more likely to occur two to three weeks after rollover, rather than right at midnight. (He still does.)

However, any recent predictions as to *duration*? How long are we looking at?

Here is Rick's quote, and he stated that he still stands by it.

Excerpt from: Will Electricity Flow In The Year 2000? An Interview With Y2K Power Expert Rick Cowles http://www.cbn.org/newsstand/y2k/cowles.asp

I've said this to you and a million other people: this isn't going to be a big bang on 1-1-2000.

Again, to try explain this in layman's terms: any large system has a certain amount of fault tolerance built into it. It's designed to be able to operate even if you've got some faults in there, because in a large complex system, Murphy's Law is going to be in there some place. And something's not going to be operating. So there is always a certain amount of fault tolerance.

The Western power outage in 1996 was a pretty good illustration of this. When you have multiple faults in a large complex system happening at the same time, you start to get a propogation of faults at an increasing rate over a period of time. And at some point in time that fault propogation is not linear, it goes exponential. And when that fault propogation goes exponential, that's the point where you reach critical mass and systems start failing.

As time progresses, and those faults begin building up in the system, and capacity issues start to come into play, what I'm concerned about is seeing the system absolutely stressed to a breaking point. In my worst-case scenario, if regional transmission facilities hit a critical mass of fault propogation, you're going to start seeing some real regional issues. I don't expect to see that kind of thing really play out in the first day or two after 1-1-2000. If you asked me to try to nail down a timeline, strictly off the top of my head, I'd say two weeks after 1-1-2000, and then you'll see a slow recovery for 15 or 30 days to some kind of equilibrium where you've at least got some degree of reliability just about everywhere.

You're going to see isolated dark spots here and there. You're going to see brown spots here and there. But you're going to see more light spots than brown or black spots.

-- Mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 29, 1999.

``Utilities are scared,'' said Cameron Daley, chief operating officer of Framingham, Massachusetts-based Tava/R.W. Beck, which tested and upgraded systems for more than 100 U.S. utilities.

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Is Cameron Daley "Mr. CEO"?

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), December 29, 1999.