Try this
>>Posted on comp.software.year-2000
From: Matthew D. Healy, Ph.D. <Matthew.Healy@yale.edu>
Subject: Electricity: Cautious Optimism
Date: Monday, May 18, 1998 2:09 PM
I do not dispute those who say the Y2K problem is a
very large problem for the electric utiltity industry. It is.
However, I also do not think it's gonna be quite as
awful as some folks here seem to think! After reading
various alarmist postings in this newsgroup last week,
and suffering some sleepless nights as a result, I spoke
with a good friend whom I will not name but who is in
a position to know the facts at one particular electric
utility.
He says the following about his company, which I will
not name:
1. They began their Y2K project in 1995, precisely because
they knew the longer they waited the more it would cost.
They expect to be done by March 1999, a target date chosen
in order to allow some time for any final "mopping-up" that
might turn out to be needed. My friend has been involved
in the Y2K project since its inception. He says the first
application they converted was a surprise, testing it cost
a lot more than had been expected, but that's precisely
why they began their project in 1995 -- in order to have
actual experience when there was still time to adjust the
budgets for later phases. Overall, more than half their
Y2K costs have been for testing.
2. They are very well along with converting their internal
IT systems to client-server; many converted systems have
been operational for some time. They are now working
on things like departmental systems. The last mainframes
should soon be gone.
3. They are well along with testing and fixing their generating
plants, with only one left to go. During scheduled maintenance
shutdowns, they advanced the date and tested, then replaced
whatever failed. Usually only a relatively small number of
embedded devices in a given plant needed replacement,
and the costs were not horrendous.
4. They are also well along with their distribution network.
Since they have at least one backup for every circuit, and in
many cases more than one, they have been able to test
their distribution system without any outages by cutting one
circuit at a time out of the loop for advanced-date testing.
Their operational people do get a little nervous whenever
they are testing a circuit for which there is only one backup,
because a failure of that backup during the testing would
mean a local outage. So far they haven't had that happen,
but since they still have some circuits to test, they may yet
have some brief local outages. But they consider the risk
of a few localized outages before Y2K as a relatively
small price to pay for avoiding Y2K problems.
There probably will be some localized outages in early Y2K,
but utility people have a tremendous amount of experience
in working around outages and getting things back on line
pretty quickly.
5. Most other large utilties are doing similar programs, and
they are exchanging data with one another concerning what
they learn. Some smaller utilities are not as far along as the
big ones and may therefore have worse problems.
6. NOBODY is making firm written guarantees about the
components they made being Y2K compliant, so they are
testing everything themselves. Even if a vendor did make
a firm promise, they would still only believe an actual test
they did themselves.
7. My friend thinks that when push comes to shove the Feds
will probably get their most critical systems fixed with a lot
of triage, and most Federal agencies will be able to function
in Y2K though at somewhat lower efficiency. Many state
governments are way behind the curve, and there are going
to be some messy situations in many capitals around the
country. But not the end of the world as we know it.
>>End of post
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