I had the chance to have an extended conversation last night with the operator for our local hydro plant. We are in excellent shape. System couldn't be simpler. All the equipment is in top physical shape. Snow falls on the mountain. Melts. Fills a couple of resevoirs. Runs down the face of the mountain through a pipeline. Powers a small, upper plant, then goes on to power the lower plant. It's big enough to put out over 3x's our local peak usage, BUT....too small to contribute to the grid (he explained the physics of this to me in great detail, I am not capable of recounting the details here).
He absolutely, positively guaranteed a worst case scenario of a max of 2 hours down time....but stressed the odds of that scenario were extremely remote.
UNFORTUNATELY.....his concern was not Y2K problems (for our local area), but what he referred to as the inevitablilty of ** THE BIG ONE**. He is greatly concerned about what deregulation has done and is doing to the power industry. According to him, the bottom line used to be **reliabilty, reliability, and reliability***. It was a personal point of honor among power producers and plant operators. They had their own in-house group ethics in which reputation and quality of your work was everything. People who screwed with the system and caused problems were scorned in the industry. Now, he says the bottom line is the bottom line. He spent considerable time explaining a series of on-going activies with power production and management of the grid which were scaring the hell out of him.
I listened for quite awhile and then said, "It sounds like you are describing a game of chicken between a couple of drunks." He said that was a very fair description of the situation. In his opinion, the focus on bottom line short term profits is placing the well-being of the gird at great risk as a result of numerous on-going practices.
So, the good news....locally, were in fat city. The bad new....**The Big One** lurks. |
