Unless the electricity industry steps up its efforts to fix the Y2K bug, the lights may indeed go out in the midst of the biggest party held in eons. That was the conclusion of a report delivered to the US Department of Energy by an electricity trade association on Thursday. The North American Electric Reliability Council said that unless Y2K-fighting efforts improve, the nation's power grid may be in for "serious disruptions."
However, NERC also said it is "cautiously optimistic" that the lights will stay on across the nation when the clocks inside untold numbers of computers misread the date 2000 and trip the breakers inside major power utilities.
"We share NERC's view that the industry needs to accelerate its efforts, particularly in the areas of testing and remediation of mission-critical systems that would be affected by Y2K problems," said Deputy Secretary of Energy Elizabeth Moler.
But such assurances are not enough for some.
"Most of the community groups we deal with are not overwhelmingly concerned with blackouts per se, but they are worried about biomedical devices that require electricity," said Paloma O'Riley, co-founder of the Cassandra Project, a group devoted to increasing awareness of health and safety issues around Y2K.
"You'd be risking your life if the power went out."
The report is the first comprehensive survey of efforts to prepare the electricity industry for the millennium bug. It was prepared in response to a request by the Department of Energy.
"At this point, the perceived operating risks are manageable," said the NERC, which estimated that potential Y2K glitches have been eliminated in 28 percent of the electricity industry's critical systems.
The carefully worded survey characterized recent reports that Y2K will trigger widespread power failures as "unsubstantiated."
But others are preparing for the worst.
"We have developed many homesteader skills over the years that do not require electricity," said Kathleen Griffy, a member of a Y2K homesteader mailing list.
"It was our intention at [the turn of the millennium] to move to Maine and be very remote. Solar-generator back-up was the plan to be off the grid," Griffy said.
The NERC, which represents more than three-quarters of the nation's electricity suppliers, emphasized the power grid's reliability in previous disasters.
"In an industry that meets record peak demands during heat waves and quickly restores service to millions of customers who lost power due to a hurricane or earthquake, preparing for and dealing with operating risks is an ingrained part of the business," said the report.
The report also downplayed notions that nuclear power plants will prove tricky over the Y2K period.
"No nuclear generating plant has found a Y2K problem in safety systems that would have prevented safe plant shutdown at the turn of the century," said Moler.
The interdependent nature of the nation's power grid make it especially vulnerable to potential Y2K failures.
The electrical infrastructure of the nation is a highly distributed and interconnected spider web of three major power grids. All of the generators and loads in each grid are connected electrically and operate together as a single interconnected machine.
As such, a major disturbance with one interconnection can immediately trigger problems in other parts of the system.
The report outlined several other Y2K threats to the electrical supply, including the embedded chips found in many power-system device controllers. The chips cannot be reprogrammed to eliminate possible Y2K trouble because they contain computer programs physically burned into the silicon.
A single circuit board might include 20 to 50 of these chips.
Also vulnerable are those power plants that run digital control systems using time-dependent algorithms. The 200 bulk control centers that form the backbone of the grid contain built-in time clocks used to run various monitoring, dispatch, and control functions.
NERC's mission is to promote the reliability of North America's power supply. It was born in 1968, in the aftermath of the 1965 blackout that affected the northeastern United States and parts of Canada.
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