Found this in the online Wall St Journal while I was on vacation during Christmas. The story dealt with whether or not Y2K was ever really a major risk, now that confidence seems high that things are in good shape (at least in the US). Of course it focused on financial matters, but it touched on other subjects as well, like power.

The WSJ is a paid subscription entity online, so I normally don't exc excerpt from it. But in this case, I will, just a bit:

**With no Y2K fix, the power grid would likely have stayed up at New Year's midnight -- at least for a while. Eric Trapp, year-2000 program manager at Southern California Edison, a unit of Edison International Inc., says his teams didn't find any potential date problems in the various relay lines, substations, transformers and the like that carry power to the company's 11 million customers spread out over 50,000 square miles in central and southern California.

**"Those systems are largely electromechanical and dumb," says Mr. Trapp. "There is not a lot of digital functioning in them."

**But that isn't true in other parts of the utility's network, especially in the hundreds of sensors located throughout the system that each send back hundreds of bits of information every few seconds. Those all rely on computers, and they might well have failed at 4 p.m. Dec. 31 California time -- midnight in the Greenwich Mean Time used as a standard by the utility industry.

**There are enough manual overrides in the control room that a systemwide shutdown would have been unlikely, Mr. Trapp says. But with control-room technicians not getting accurate reports about power usage in a particular area, they wouldn't have been able to allocate electricity properly to keep pace with demand. That might have led to localized brownouts.

**Another potential danger: With its sensors down, the utility wouldn't have known which of its power lines were "hot" -- something that could have endangered the lives of its repair crews.

Interesting, eh? Does this mean that if other power companies did not start in time, these particular problems were not corrected, and thus brownouts in other areas are possible?

-- Anonymous, December 30, 1999

Answers

What about the generating plants themselves? The ABB report made clear that at least some plants were exposed to Y2K problems that could have taken them down. Perhaps Mr. Trapp should give Dr. Klaus Ragaller a call. While he's at it, Mr. Trapp might give some folks at TAVA/Beck a call, too; reportedly they know a thing or two about power company embedded systems, having audited the work of 100-200 U.S. power companies and not having been always too happy about what they found.

-- Anonymous, December 30, 1999

We may not loose our function, but I am concerned about the possibility that we may loose our mind.

-- Anonymous, December 30, 1999

Don,

Yes, I was extremely displeased that I did not get the chance to follow up on my brief discussion with Cam Daley at Tava/RW. I was hoping to do so right into December, but then I got tied up with TV production duties... *sigh*. Bummer.

This WSJ piece was quite interesting, though. It's one of the few times I've seen a power company type admit that brownouts could have happened had Y2K repairs not been undertaken...

-- Anonymous, December 30, 1999