Dan, FactFinder, Tis, or anyone else within the industry. There is a debate going on a private forum I attend regarding why the electric utilities got through the last week so well. Some think, and say, that most of them went manual to avoid all the embedded systems and other possible software exposures. I have said that I didn't see that mentioned anywhere and that anyway there are still some functions that can not be handled manually anymore. Does anyone know what the story is? Was there any significant amount of electric providers that went to manual? Also, on that forum, is a statement that there is a lot of dirty power going on now. I don't have that with my own dear Conectiv, and I think the guy who said it is just grasping at straws. Can you help me out here and set me straight. I promise I will take you at your word.

-- Anonymous, January 09, 2000

Answers

Hi Gordon...here's my $.02:

I don't know of any United States utilities that "went to manual". By that I mean that they didn't disable their power plant control systems and manually adjust things to ramp units up and down. Supposedly there are Russian grids that do this sort of thing on a semi-regular basis, and evidently they did this for the rollover.

Some things that might be mis-construed to have been "going to manual": Normally for a larger utility, the generation is dispatched economically, i.e., when 50 MW more is needed, the computer figures out what the most economical unit is to bring on line, and in some cases does so automatically. But the night of the rollover, we had to have several extra units on line, and thus eliminate economic dispatch, so we didn't use this automatic dispatch for several hours before and after the rollover.

Second, there were electricians and technicians at several electrical substations, available to open and close circuit breakers and switches at the substation. Normally, these sites are not manned, and the operators would perform switching remotely through a SCADA system. This too might be misconstrued as "going to manual".

Either way, none of this is still going on today; to my knowledge all North American utilities are back to "business as usual". And as far as the "dirty power", there has not been a single case of a documented Y2k-caused power glitch of any kind. In other words, the power is no dirtier or cleaner than it ever is. Our utility had two outages during the rollover weekend; one from metallic balloons (I guess you could call that "Y2k-related"), and one from bird poop on insulators at a substation.

I hope this helps...

-- Anonymous, January 09, 2000

Gordon,

Hope you dont mind Gordon but, I will cheat a little here and use Dans definitions for manual operations. : )

Comparatively speaking, our utility is rather small although we do operate as a control area in the FRCC region. Our contingency plans called for staffing our substations in a manner similar to Dans. All our interconnect substations were also manned with qualified, experienced staff. Each substation operator was given a pre- formatted, hardcopy template for taking manual readings during the crucial rollover periods which in our view was from 11:00 p.m. through 1:00 a.m. This was to establish an immediate operating history for reference and we maintained four means of voice communications which included radio, telephone, mobile phone and carrier phone to relay this manually acquired data in case the fiber optic system failed. Fortunately, it was a wonderful waste of paper.

All these substations are connected to our EMS system and are typically operated remotely through our Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (SCADA). Our Automatic Generation Control (AGC) system was operated in Tie Line Bias mode which simply means that we were monitoring all the components necessary to calculate our Area Control Error or ACE. Simply, ACE is the mathematical difference in megawatts between what we are actually doing and what we want to do. Effectively, it balances the generation obligation to meet demand. The trick here is to keep ACE at zero. If I recall correctly, by 11:00 p.m., we had floated or ramped all sales and purchases to zero. Extra generation was on-line or on hot-standby. All on-line units combustion systems were in automatic and control of each generator had been removed from local control and was released to the AGC operator for remote control or automatic dispatch.

By 1:30 a.m. EST, we had completed post rollover checks and prepared to report by conference call to our region. By 2 a.m. personnel were starting to be released.

To my knowledge, I know of no system that maintained some or any of their control systems in manual specifically to ensure an uneventful rollover. Based on a conference call and information available on NERCs reporting bulletin board and subsequent conversations with other systems following the CST rollover, I have heard no mention of bulk or partial manual operations during the period. Im sure it is not beyond the improbable that someone somewhere may have but I am unaware of it.

Another interesting question I have is Does anyone know of a control area or system anywhere that intentionally isolated themselves prior to the rollover? This was a constant question I received prior to this event and I was wondering if anyone chose to go it alone after all.

Thanks Gordon,

-- Anonymous, January 10, 2000

Tis,

SUPPOSEDLY, Virginia Power isolated themselves from the grid, to some extent or other. Whether or not that's true, I haven't confirmed...

-- Anonymous, January 10, 2000

Dan and Tis,

Thanks for the answers and explanations. That is pretty much as I suspected. Personally, I don't count any "manual" running of systems during the actual rollover period as significant. That just seems like a common sense contingency plan that was in place. There are some "unhappy" posters on some forums who are trying every possible avenue to validate their own prior beliefs, to explain away the smooth transition, and I think that is why these stretches of reality are going on. I am beginning to see some pretty contorted attempts to make the data fit the hypothesis, which has always been a "no-no" in any legitimate investigation or experiment.

Drew,

I would like to speculate about Virginia Power. There had been some rumors late last year that they might isolate at least part of their system from the grid. If they are supplying critical government and military needs in that area, it would make sense to me that some islanding would be a good idea, as a contingency plan. Of course if this was approved, maybe even directed, by the government it will be downplayed or pushed out of the spotlight. Still, what difference did it make anyway? None that I can see.

-- Anonymous, January 10, 2000

Gordon,

I have been told that Virginia Power actually did not go off the grid, although I haven't had time to confirm that with VP itself (I got sideswiped by an unexpected work project when I came in this morning, and only now am getting back on my feet, so to speak). Given what I understood (properly) to be the original source of the info (backed up second-hand by another), I thought it was worth mentioning in a caveated form (ie, as unconfirmed). If I get the chance (HA!), I'll try to give VP a call to see what the story was. It may have been a mixup in terminology.

Actually, I never had much doubt in VP's own Y2K program... Among other things, they started early, which was a good sign...

-- Anonymous, January 10, 2000

Gordon, Dan and Tis have pretty much answered this. I appreciate Tis's input on the EMS and SCADA operation through Y2K, for I really had no knowledge of how they were going to operate distribution through Y2K (I finished up my nuke plant y2k project in June, and had only limited knowledge of the contingency plans for distribution).

The power plants I have been involved with all ran on normal controls (automatic), although several of the baseload nukes ran at reduced power.

Somewhere I posted in a thread (I think at TB2000) that most plants had manual backup controls, but in thinking about this, this was a LOBA (loss of brain accident). Some do, but some really can't run without the automatic control systems, at least very effectively, since even running in "manual" for some systems means running via the DCS (distributed control system). Most valves, pumps, etc. in the nukes can be operated manually, but that's a long way from operating the plant "in manual", i.e., the operator might throttle a valve instead of it being done automatically by the feedback loops. One example is the feedwater control system, which essentially must be operable to run the plant. In some plants its older analog control, in others its digital (of course in some really old ones its probably manual/analog). Just wanted to clear this mistake of mine up here in case I mislead anyone, hope I haven't made it murkier.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, January 10, 2000