Category:
Power_Grid
Date:
1998-06-13 20:38:58
Subject:
Senate Hearings on the Grid: Media Coverage Is High
Link:
msnbc.com
Comment:
Senator Bennett's Committee is taking a bipartisan stance. Senator
Dodd is as hard core as Sen. Bennett is.
This committee's June 12 hearings hit the media. The power grid is
the premier domino. If it goes down, all the others will fall. It may go
down.
This is from the Microsoft/NBC site (June 12). Note that at the
bottom of the document are four links to y2k sites. Mine is the
fourth.
Word is getting out: about y2k and about my site.
I will be mainstream before 1999 ends. And when I am, all my critics
will say, "Lucky guess."
* * * * * * * * * * *
CHAIRMAN ROBERT Bennett, R-Utah, said a survey his office
sent to 10 of the nation's largest electric, oil and gas utilities showed
their preparations to ward off Year 2000 bugs were lagging. Eight of
the companies had not even finished assessing their automated
systems, a first step in tackling the problem, Bennett said.
"I had anticipated that I would be able to provide a positive report
on the Year 2000 status of these public utilities," he said. "Instead,
based on the results of this survey, I am genuinely concerned about
the very real prospects of power shortages as a consequence of the
millennial date change."
And it was Bennett who warned that he felt there was "a 100
percent chance" the U.S. power grid would collapse if today were
Jan. 1, 2000. Because the date is 18 months away, he estimated the
chance of collapse on that date is 40 percent - not as high, but still
significant. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., the committee co-chair was
as pessimistic as Bennett, saying he feared many government and
business leaders hadn't even drafted contingency plans.
The government and industry experts who testified Friday were
unable to reassure the committee that utilities were ready for Jan. 1,
2000. "The state of year 2000 readiness of the utility industry is
largely unknown," warned the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission, James Hoecker. . . .
The committee's first hearing focused on utilities because of their key
role in the economy.
In the case of electric utilities, at risk are about 6,000 power plants,
half a million miles of high-voltage power lines and about 112,000
substations. These in turn depend on built-in, preprogrammed
microprocessors called "embedded systems," many of which contain
the Year 2000, or Y2K, bug.
"If the power grid goes down because of connections in the
computers or because of embedded chips in certain power plants
that shut those power plants down because of bad software
somewhere, then it is all over," Bennett said last month on the Senate
floor. "It doesn't matter if every computer in the country is Y2K
compliant if you can't plug it into something."
He added that it's not just electric utilities either, but gas and water
as well. "The water treatment system in every municipality in this
country is computer driven," he said, "and has the potential of being
upset because of embedded chips and bad software." . . .
CONCERN ABOUT CITY POWER LINES
Even before the hearing began, experts noted that among electric
utilities city-owned power companies appeared the most vulnerable.
They provide 25 percent of the nation's power, but more importantly
the nature of the interconnected power grid means that if even only a
few utilities aren't compliant by 2000 the entire grid could be hit
hard.
Since all power companies, private and public alike, are
interconnected, outages anywhere can have a ripple effect,
destabilizing other parts of the grid and triggering outages sometimes
several states away.
"The whole is only as strong as the all the pieces ... the whole grid
has to work as well," said Mike McClure, head of Year 2000 efforts
at the Atlanta-based utility Southern Company.
McClure and Dennis Grabow, head of The Millennium Investment
Corp., are among those who believe that city-owned utilities are
lagging behind investor-owned power companies. "I am definitely
concerned," Grabow said. "Some of the municipal companies, often
for lack of budget, haven't even started the inventory or checking
process." THE EMBEDDED PROBLEM
The heart of the utilities' problem are the "embedded systems," or
the many computer chips contained within a single mainframe
computer.
"When you consider the number of chips that need changing, outages
are almost a certainty," said Andrew Pegalis, head of Next
Millennium Consulting. "Embedded systems require a monumental
effort. They first must be located, they must then be tested, and some
of the manufacturers of these chips have gone out of business, which
means you often don't know how they were programmed."
garynorth.com |
