US Power Grid Experts
Issue Major Y2K Warning
By James Jelter
6-12-98
"We are looking at some very dark clouds
ahead."
NEW YORK (Reuters) - All the talk of coaxing computers
to clear
the Millennium hurdle assumes there will still be
electricity to run
them. Perhaps not. A Senate hearing Friday led by Sen.
Robert
Bennett (R-Utah) will listen to a panel of experts
explain why the
vast North American power grid is also vulnerable to the
Year 2000
bug and whether pending computer malfunctions can be
overcome.
On this point, the experts vary. Some warn of widespread
outages
when the clock strikes midnight, January 1, 2000,
confounding
computer chips unable to decifer the date. Others claim
steps now
being taken by electric utilities, which amass sales of
$230 billion a
year, will ensure only minor problems, many of which can
be
manually overridden.
But all agree the problem is vast, costly, and that
efforts to correct it
carry no absolute guarantees. At risk are about 6,000
power plants,
half a million miles of high-voltage power lines and
about 112,000
substations, most of which depend on built-in,
preprogrammed
microprocessors called ``embedded systems.'' ``When you
consider
the number of chips that need changing, outages are
almost a
certainty,'' said Andrew Pegalis, head of Next
Millennium Consulting
in Bethesda, Md. ``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,''
he said.
Industry analysts predict the tedious task, including
replacement
chips, will cost most power companies between $10
million and $100
million. Mike McClure, head of Atlanta-based Southern
Company's
Millennium Project, said Southern has allocated $85.6
million to the
problem, of which it has already spent $19 million.
Southern's
approach is typical: Locate embedded systems, test them
to identify
which pose problems, swap out those that are critical to
operating the
power system and develop contingency plans to deal with
eventual
emergencies. ``Control systems are the central nervous
system of a
power plant, and that's where we're focusing most of our
attention,''
McClure said. He said Southern has completed the
identification
phase of the program and was now busy testing.
McClure said he anticipated few problems on Southern's
own
system, and that this was the case with the nearly 200
other big,
investor-owned U.S. power companies. But he cautioned
that some
of the municipally-owned power companies, which generate
about
25 percent of the nation's electricity, were moving a
bit slowly on the
Year 2000 issue. Since all power companies, private and
public alike,
are interconnected via the power grid, 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,'' McClure
said. Dennis Grabow, head of Chicago-based The
Millennium
Investment Corp, is among those alarmed by the apparent
lack of
urgency among some power providers, especially the
municipals. ``I
am definitely concerned ... some of the municipal
companies, often
for lack of budget, haven't even started the inventory
or checking
process,'' Grabow said. Jon Arnold, chief technology
officer at the
Edison Electric Institute, a trade group representing
investor-owned
electric companies, belongs to the camp that sees the
industry solving
the majority of these technical challenges in time. ``No
one is going
to guarantee there won't be any problems, but based on
the programs
in place, it's extremely unlikely any kind of massive
power collapse
will take place,'' he said. ``The power grid is very
dynamic and the
people at the control centers are very experienced in
dealing with
outages, whether from hurricanes, ice storms, or
whatever.
One advantage we have in this case is that we know the
date, and if
there are problems, we'll be ready to deal with them,''
he said.
Another factor working to the industry's advantage is
that Jan. 1,
2000, falls on a Saturday, when power demand typically
is at a low
point for the week. Arnold pointed out that this will
make it easier for
operating power plants to step in and stabilize the grid
if other plants
should fail. Ironically, some of the most reliable power
plants in this
scenario will likely be older units, which use analog
technology that
predates digital, making them less vulnerable to Year
2000 bugs.
Arnold said these units will likely be kept on standby
to pick up the
slack if other plants trip off line going into the new
year. Despite
assurances from the industry and what he calls admirable
progress,
Grabow is not convinced regulators, the government, or
the public
are giving the Year 2000 issue the full attention it
requires. ``There
needs to be greater national recognition of this
problem. We think it's
time for the president or vice president to show some
leadership and
acknowledge the problem. We are looking at some very
dark clouds
ahead,'' Grabow warned.
Some computers can be reprogrammed through tedious rewriting of
their software code, but many devices -- such as the
utility industry's
"frequency relays" and other monitoring equipment --
have
embedded microchips that must be physically replaced.
Shirley Jackson, the chairwoman of the Nuclear
Regulatory
Commission, testified Friday that her agency is
requiring the nation's
nuclear plants to report their progress by mid-August.
She said the NRC believes the problem "will not have an
adverse
impact on the ability of a nuclear power plant to safely
operate or
safely shut down."
Oz Power Grid Facing Y2K Crisis -
WHETHER the electricity remains on after January 1,
2000, is the
big unknown of the millennium computer glitch, says
power industry
consultant John Catterall.
The West Australian manager for Infrastructure Control
Systems, Mr
Catterall says if the computers controlling the
electricity grid fail, the
consequences could be nothing short of catastrophic.
Yet, to date, the electricity industry has been
reluctant to test for the
problem.
"It's the most important aspect of year 2000 compliance.
If the
electricity doesn't make it, and we have significant
problems in the
electricity industry, all the work being done elsewhere
will have been
a waste of time," he says.
Mr Catterall, who was previously in charge of the
compliance
program for electricity utility Western Power in Perth,
says if the grid
goes down for more than four or five hours because of
the bug, then
the power could, potentially, be off for at least
several weeks until
the problem is fixed.
At the centre of Mr Catterall's concern is the system
controlling the
grid, the SCADA, short for Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition.
"Essentially, if you lose control of your SCADA system,
you lose
control of the grid because you won't know what's going
on in it,"
Mr Catterall says.
A SCADA system, in essence, gathers information from
along the
grid to determine how it is performing and how output
can be
adjusted to match load demand to ensure maximum
performance.
And, like the rest of the power industry, it contains
many
date-dependent computer chips.
The interconnectedness of the system means that a fault
just a few
faults could be enough to bring down the SCADA and, with
it, the
grid.
In the event of a computer failure, a grid without a
SCADA would be
"flying blind" and vulnerable to damage unless closed
down.
"They are extremely vulnerable to the year 2000 and,
depending on
how the information on the grid gets back through the
SCADA, the
potential could be catastrophic," Mr Catterall warns.
He says some utilities do not appear to be adequately
addressing the
year 2000 issue. They have still not fully appreciated
the scope of
the problem, judging by their faith in the guarantees of
millennium
compliance given by the vendors of both the software and
the
computer hardware that control the grid and power
production.
He says there has been a reluctance for utilities to
wind forward to
2000 to see what could happen.
That reluctance could be due to the fact that any
millennium change
problems may come early, as happened in New Zealand with
its grid
authority Transpower.
Transpower is still determining what went wrong even
though
outside consultants had given that grid system the
all-clear as being
year 2000 compliant before it was tested.
Mr Catterall says the major benefit of testing now
rather than waiting
until January 2000 is that, in a controlled and tested
environment,
problems affecting the grid can be fixed far more
readily.
If a component is needed, then there is more chance it
can be
ordered and installed quickly.
After January 2000, the rest of the economy will be
caught up in
dealing with its own bug problems, making repairs and
getting
technicians to the site of grid breakdowns all that much
harder to
achieve.
Mr Catterall's experience at Western Power was that once
a
company began to appreciate the extent of their year
2000 problems,
they then began to realise they could not guarantee full
compliance
but only attempt to mitigate the worst effects of the
date changeover.
Mr Catterall says the power industry needs to thoroughly
test its
SCADA systems but there has been a commercial and
political
reluctance to do so.
Although a notional national grid now exists between
NSW, Victoria
and South Australia, each State would have to test its
own grid.
However, a meeting of electricity industry executives in
Melbourne
later this month is expected to outline a timetable for
tentative
national testing arrangements.
NSW Transgrid chief executive Warwick Grainger says his
organisation which controls that State's grid network
expects to have
all its critical systems year 2000 compliant by the end
of 1998.
But Mr Catterall warns that time is running out. With
summer and
winter as peak load times, the only period of the year
with adequate
excess capacity to allow power stations to shut down,
and back-up
grid control systems to operate, are spring and autumn.
"Time is running out and there still is no co-ordinated
plan to get the
generation aspects of year 2000 certified," he says.
Mr Catterall points out that the grid is not the only
source of his year
2000 worries.
Power stations are "chock-a-block" full of embedded
systems, that
is, silicon chips that control electricity production
that could be
affected by the millennium bug.
He says he knows of only one power station that has been
tested for
millennium bug compliance by winding the date forward to
year
2000. That was in Britain and the power station failed.