In the "Awards" Mr. Cowles presented this week, one was presented to the Electirc Co-Ops. I didn't understand the import of this. Are the co-ops in worse shape than others?

-- Anonymous, March 27, 1998

Answers

Simply put, co-ops and municipally owned utilities are low profit margin operations. Their revenues come almost exclusively from their members (customers) electric bills, rather than the stockmarket or other investments. So, most don't have the financial resources to be putting a great deal of money into a Y2k program.

It's a bad deal anyway you look at it. If they put the required resources into the program, they potentially break the bank now. If they don't, they potentially go out of business (and some people lose power) post-01/01/2000.

Hopefully, this answer provides a little context to the "Herbert Hoover" award.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 1998

Re smaller municipal utilities - electric or water - has anyone done a publically available study of even one of these entities in detail in order to lay bare the unique vulnerabilities, so that others who rely on such systems could take the study to their public ulitiy district commissioners or city council and say "Look at this"?

-- Anonymous, March 29, 1998

To answer Victor's question, I doubt that anyone's done a detailed study to assess the unique vulnerabilities of electric co-ops. I know that the National Rural Electric Coop Association has a Y2k track at their annual June meeting, but don't know if NRECA will be sponsoring any studies or not.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 1998

My company is an electric utility consulting engineering firm that specializes in working with small and medium sized publicly and cooperatively owned electric utilties. Some of them are the best run utilities in the industry. It all depends upon the utility. I can list several large investor owned electric utilities that are in far worse shape from a reliability, maintenance practices, and y2k perspective than some really small utilities.

If you want to genarlize about cooperatives, you can say that most don't have as much of their own generation as their sister investor owned electric utility. That means they don't have as many y2k system to worry about fixing. On the other hand it means that they are more dependent upon the transmission power grid, and upon bulk power suppliers like Federal Power Marketing Agencies, large Generation & Transmission Coopertives, State Joint Action Agencies, and investor owned utilities.

As a public power advocate, I think that cooperatives have some y2k issues, but not the way they have been painted in this thread.

Bob Schneider V.P. D. Hittle & Associates, Inc.

-- Anonymous, July 11, 1998