Well balanced reporting out of the mainstream press. (I have been tracking PECO as it also manages and owns many formerly "troubled" nuclear plants. No mention of it in this article.) This reporter actually looked at the % of y2k budget spent by PECO to date, considered supply line problems with coal and gas, and discussed contingency plans. Industry critics quoted at the end of the article are well respected. All in all not a bad article.
(:~O no HFSA)
phillynews.com
February 16, 1999
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Confronting Y2K
Electricity industry optimistic about 2000
One in an occasional series on the Year 2000 computer glitch.
By Rich Heidorn Jr.
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
If it had feelings, Peco Energy Co.'s Sherwood substation would be as lonely as the Maytag repairman.
Outside this one-story brick building on City Avenue in Overbrook, transformers convert high-voltage electricity from Peco's generators to lower-voltage current for delivery to more than 2,550 homes and businesses. Inside, circuit breakers and relays protect the distribution system from overloads and help pinpoint problems.
Peco employees used to staff the station 24 hours a day. But since Peco installed remote monitoring and control equipment about 10 years ago, the station has run mostly by itself.
And that, come New Year's, could be a problem. Some of the equipment is potentially vulnerable to the Year 2000 computer glitch, in which computers and software programmed to recognize only the last two numbers of a year will not be able to distinguish the year 2000 from 1900. Unless the problem is fixed, systems could fail or produce inaccurate results.
Corporate America is expected to spend more than $150 billion to make sure computers work on New Year's Day. But it will all be for naught if there is no electricity to run them.
One potential problem at the Peco site is the GE Harris 9600, a briefcase-size black box that reports to Peco headquarters with data on conditions at the substation.
"If they lose this, they lose their eyes and ears," said Peco analyst Bob Moyer, who was at the station last week to moni tor a test of the equipment.
A small outage could cause a bigger one. And that is why Peco is spending $75 million to check its infrastructure for problems that could turn the lights out.
The project has been an eye-opening experience, said Dave Hoefner, Y2K project manager.
"We retired and replaced over one-half of the [ software and hardware ] portfolio we had two years ago," Hoefner said. "We have uncovered systems we did not know existed; discovered external software that is mission-critical. . . . We had many suppliers whose documentation said they were Y2K compliant and they failed our tests."
The North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry-funded group designated by the U.S. Department of Energy to coordinate industry's efforts, says it is optimistic that there will be no interruptions in power with the new year. If there are outages, they should be corrected within minutes or hours, industry officials say.
"Across all of North America, more than 50 percent of the most critical systems have been tested and/or remediated. No test has yet done anything that would have created an outage," said John Castagna, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the trade organization for investor-owned utilities.
Others are not so sanguine.
"I think we're no longer at the point of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions, but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions will be," said Sen. Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) at a hearing in June of the special Senate committee on the Year 2000.
Sen. Robert Bennett (R., Utah), chairman of the committee, fears there will be scattered outages, most likely in areas served by rural cooperatives. "It's obvious . . . that the industry still has the bulk of its heavy lifting ahead of itself," says Don Meyer, spokesman for the Senate committee.
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, which had expressed concern last summer about its licensees' preparedness, now expects no more than minor problems among the electric, telecommunications, water and gas utilities.
Nevertheless, both the PUC and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities are planning to hire a consultant to perform spot audits of the major utilities. "We'll trust but verify," said Dennis Buckley, Y2K coordinator for PUC Chairman John Quain.
Computer consultant Rick Cowles, author of a book on Y2K and the electric industry, says the North American Electric Reliability Council's public statements are more upbeat than warranted by the data submitted by its members.
The council says 98 percent of the electrical systems in the United States and Canada have replied to requests for status reports on their Y2K efforts.
But Cowles says more than two-thirds of those who responded to the Reliability Council's most recent survey, in November, said they would not have all mission-critical operations ready by the council's June 30 goal. About 28 percent do not expect to finish until September or later, Cowles said.
"They've got an obvious vested interest in putting the best foot forward," Cowles said. "The Dow Jones utility index would probably take a pretty good hit if [ the council ] came out and said we've got some problems here, we're not sure we're going to meet our goals."
The Electric Reliability Council acknowledges that the industry is "slightly lagging" its targets, but insists there is plenty of time to complete the work before Jan. 1.
Unlike water and natural gas, electricity cannot be stored on a large scale. There is little that consumers or businesses can do to prepare for the possibility of a blackout, aside from buying a generator or stocking up on flashlight batteries and candles.
Consumers can take comfort from the fact that the electric industry has a long history of cooperation. Unlike widget makers, electric utilities regularly rely on each other to meet supply shortfalls due to plant shutdowns.
North America has four major electric grid systems, the largest of which covers the eastern two-thirds of North America.
"When you look at this vast system, you're bound to have mistakes," said investment adviser Dennis Grabow, head of the Millennium Investment Corp. of Chicago, who is working on a study of the electric industry's Year 2000 exposure.
The North American Electric Reliability Council acknowledges the possibility of a failure, such as the simultaneous loss of multiple generating and transmission facilities.
"A major disturbance in one part of an interconnection has the potential to cascade through the entire interconnection," council president Michehl Gent told the Senate. He emphasized that the likelihood of such an event is "extremely low."
In addition to their own Y2K problems, electric companies also could be hobbled by a lack of adequate supplies of coal, oil, natural gas or water. Peco, for example, says it is lining up alternates for critical suppliers unable to certify that they will be ready for the new year.
Industry experts say the electric system can lose some generating facilities without anyone losing power. They note that the changeover will occur at midnight, over a weekend, and in the winter -- low-demand periods for most of North America.
As part of their contingency plans, Peco and the other utilities in Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware plan to have all plants running or ready to run with a few minutes' notice, according to Stan Kijewski, chief information officer for the PJM Interconnection, the regional power pool.
Utilities with inadequate supply would attempt to buy power from other suppliers. If supply were still short, utilities could cut off large industrial customers that have "interruptible" contracts and reduce voltage on the system by 3 to 5 percent, which would dim home lighting but have no significant effect on computers or appliances.
PJM's system is configured so that the loss of any single transmission line or generator will not cause an outage or jeopardize the entire system, according to Tom Kennedy, PJM's Y2K project manager.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, has required all nuclear operators to certify by July 1 that they are ready. It says nuclear plants' safety systems generally are controlled by older equipment not vulnerable to Year 2000 problems.
In September, the NRC began auditing 12 nuclear plants as a cross section of the industry by geography, type of design, and age. Among those selected was Peco's Limerick plant, to which NRC auditors gave good grades after a three-day visit in November.
Peco's $75 million Y2K budget is three times its earlier estimate. It had spent about $21 million of that through the end of 1998.
Peco spokesman Mike Wood said the company has had its readiness efforts audited by two outside consulting firms.
Cowles and Grabow of the Millennium Investment Corp. say the federal government should contract for its own audits to document the industry's preparedness claims.
Grabow said he did a study of spending by about three dozen investor-owned electric and natural gas utilities and found that most had spent less than 40 percent of their anticipated Y2K budgets through September.
Thus far, the Clinton administration has given no indication that it will -- or thinks it can -- do much to pressure the utilities. "At present, there is little in the way of either federal or state regulatory authority to address reliability issues," Deputy Energy Secretary Elizabeth Moler told the Senate.
The Energy Department has no plans to conduct independent audits, but Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced last month that it will review utilities' contingency plans and take part in industrywide drills slated for April and September.
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©1999 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
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