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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DavesM who wrote (5357)	11/30/2000 11:48:05 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

Dave, some observations on the subject of power grid reliability from the North American Network Operators' Group mailing list (NANOG). NANOG is comprised of Internet Service Providers, both on the access side and the backbone end of the business. From a thread titled, "Will the Lights Still be on..." -----------begin snips: election of postive and negative outlooks for the reliability of the north american electric power grid. George Bush, Jr. has cited the growth of the Internet as one cause for power shortages. "Electric system resources will be adequate to meet projected electricity demand in North America this winter. Of course, extreme weather conditions and unexpected equipment problems may produce demands that exceed generation and transmission margins" source: ftp://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/pubs/winter2000.pdf "Californians are getting a two-fold warning at the first sign of cold weather: The state says there may be blackouts and a major utility is warning of sharply higher bills." source: dailynews.yahoo.com "Barring excessive heat, California should have enough electricity supply to meet its demand next summer, according to new -- and disputed -- projections from the California Energy Commission." source: dailynews.yahoo.com "Responding to concerns about deterioration of the U.S. electric power grid, Congress within the next five years will enact legislation mandating minimum standards for reducing downtime and improving system reliability, a panel of utility industry analysts and journalists predicted here this week." source: ces.com --------- In other words, consumers are starting to pay the price for blocking construction of power generation plants. Increasing demand with no increase in generating capacity means shortages. For those opposed to nuclear, you should note that many coal plants produce more radioactive waste then nuclear plants. Some coal slag from coal power plants has more uranium in it then nuclear power plant fuel rods;) ---------- I'm not sure. I just remember the nuclear engr people talking about how radioactive coal plants were since there was no radiation standard for them and that some of the coal slag was more enriched then fuel rods. One of my student college jobs was at the RPI linear accelerator lab doine software work for the nuclear engineering dept. One of the projects was part of a contract on energy needs analysis for the New York State Power Agency (I think that was their name) ------ NEW YORK, Nov 29 (Reuters) - New Jersey, in an effort to encourage utilities to improve the reliability of the state's electric system, adopted, late Tuesday, standards designed to reduce outage frequency and duration. biz.yahoo.com Essentially every book on security, quality control, reliability, etc includes a statement "First, you must have the attention of the top management." How do you get the attention of the top management? Will passing a law or a regulation improve reliablity? It could, if it got the attention of the management of the companies to increase the budget for doing the things better reliability requires. I'm at the damage prevention convention this week. All the major carriers had people on one of the panels on the problem of fiber cuts. The scariest thing is most carriers only have 1 or 2 people in their entire organization responsible for damage prevention. Worldcom has 2 people watching 60,000 router miles. I think Level 3 had 1 person. Qwest International had 2 people. ATT has a department, but even that seems to be downsized. When carriers are merged, the damage prevention budget is usually cut in half. I was very impressed with the people from all the carriers. They are all working very hard. But how much can 1 or 2 people really do? Fundamentally, if you want to improve reliability you must make reliability important to the top management of a company. Make it worth the budget management must approve to hire the people to implement the reliability program. Do you know what I want in an SLA? I would prefer my circuit never fails, but when it does I don't want money. I want a public apology from the CEO of the company. CEO's at major companies tend to have very strong personalities. They hate to ever admit any problems. Notice when carriers issue press releases with good news, it always includes a quote from the CEO. But when they release bad news, it is always a spokesperson. Maybe if the CEO had to deal with the fall out of reliability problems, he or she would decide increasing the budget a bit is worth it. After Ebay's CEO had to appear on CNBC, suddenly reliability became important for Ebay. After AOL's CEO had to appear, suddenly reliability became a top management concern of AOL and they spent a lot of money on it. ----------- At the time I worked on the contract with NYSPA around 1976, the reliability goal was one failure in 10 years. This did not include failures from accidents, like cars knocking down power poles, lightning strikes, etc. From what I've seen at least where I am in NYS, we've had 2 2 hour outages in the last 6 years, one unscheduled, one scheduled for maintenance. The phone company hasn't been as reliable. ----------end snips The part about Ebay, of course, refers to their recent half hour outage last week some time. The syndrome described by this poster is known as the D/R denial curve. Sudden awareness after a disaster, which tapers off over time. Would someone care to comment, corroborate or correct the statement concerning coal slag? FAC