To: C.K. Houston who wrote (447 ) 11/16/1997 1:41:00 AM From: C.K. Houston Respond to
UTIITIES & Y2K & EMBEDDED SYSTEMS: Oh dear! Automated systems are indeed widespread throughout power utilities. Exposure to the industry would in my opinion rate as extreme. At Western Power, our IT compliance project (cost around $3 million and employing 35 Full time employees) is trivial in comparison to the issues we face on the control and embedded systems front. Just leaving aside the problems associated with ensuring supply of such items such as fuel, from the weighbridges and conveyor systems through to intelligent metering and meter reading systems dates are endemic.Many of the control systems represented in power systems, have dates associated with them. These could be reclosers, Voltage regulators, Governors, PLCs etc. The list is endless. You then have a swathe of actual 'applications' involved in the delivery of electicity such as your Distributed Control Systems and your SCADA (System Control and DATA (eg.dates) Acquisition) systems, all of which have dates associated with them. Much of what happens throughout the process of generating and delivering electricity is 'DATE AND TIME STAMPED'.Any suggestion that power systems don't use dates or could not be affected by the Year 2000 problem is at best ill-informed. But then, if this is a diirect quote from John Greer he did say they are not interested in what 'Day of the Year it is'. Strictly a power system is not interested in whether it's Monday or a Tuesday for it to operate correctly, the operators may well be (dates and times are important for us even at a metering level) but it will almost certainly have dates.
