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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (4196)	2/28/1999 2:40:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 9818

'On Sun, 28 Feb 1999 13:32:34 GMT, phinias_t_phoobar@my-dejanews.com wrote: >Seriously, the only thing I can think of is that machinery suddenly halting >or starting up en masse would cause fluctuations in the current that would >make the system go unstable. Sometimes, stories like this get muddled in the translation between the semi-technical industry person and the non-technically savvy person who is reporting the story. The issue is not with small home appliances. The concern is this, and has been expressed by many electric companies: If, during the transition, an electric company sees an immediate change in system loading or usage patterns, it will be difficult to immediately discern why a problem has occurred, and the electric system operators could react to the demand change improperly. That's why Ontario Hydro has stressed to it's industrial customers the need to maintain normal usage patterns during the transition. There is another issue, too. Say, for example, a large industrial electricity user (refinery, steel mill, chemical plant) suddenly drops off line during the transition because of a Y2k induced process fault. If an industrial user suddenly stops using 100MW of electricity, and simultaneously, the same thing happens to a bunch more, electrical spikes could propagate through the regional transmission network that could destabilize the network, causing significant voltage / frequency oscillations. When this type of disturbance happens in a transmission network, it is the inherent nature of electrical transmission systems for these oscillations to tend to increase in magnitude until fault monitoring devices start shutting down portions of the system in an attempt to dampen the oscillations. This process happens automatically, and in time frames of electrical cycles (60 cycles per second in North America) rather than seconds or minutes. The power outage in the western U.S. and Canadian provinces during 1996 (8 states and 2 provinces were affected) took 35 seconds to propagate through the entire system due to system oscillations effect described above. Here's some references for background information: greenspun.com wscc.com Hope this helps. -- Rick Cowles (Public PGP key on request) www.euy2k.com : Electric Utilities and Y2k Toll Free 1-877-503-2323 "ZAPPED" : A Household Video Primer for Dealing with Long Power Outages RealPlayer(tm) clip at: www.euy2k.com/video.htm