I just looked at the NERC August spreadsheet for the most important parts of the power infrastructure (by FERC's own assessment) and did a simple average of their percent readiness as they indicate as a function of time. It goes like this:

Period % completed 3Q98 30 4Q98 50 1Q99 62 2Q99 74 3Q99 78 4Q99 80

The 80% seems to indicate that 20% of responding utilities didn't respond to that question (ouch!). Several of them report that they will be at 0% completed til 4Q99 when they jump to 100% (ouch!!). At only 30% completed as of today (actually end of September) it's not so easy to buy into this rate of progress. On the other side, the report to the DOE indicates that most companies are finding fewer problems than they anticipated. Of course more than 20% of all providers simply did not respond at all - so who knows what that means.

There are a lot of raw numbers in their spreadsheet and I haven't had time to analyze it yet, but I think that it would be most helpful to have a comprehensive analysis of the results backed up by numbers as a part of keeping the public and officials aware of the situation.

As an aside, here are results from July that indicate expected completion dates for critical systems required to keep the power flowing:

December 31, 1998 22% July 1, 1999 55% December 31, 1999 6%

The total comes to 83% but perhaps even more importantly, these estimates - when tken side by side with the % completed figures above yield:

July Aug 4Q98 22 50 2Q99 77 74 4Q99 83 80

Remembering that we are comparing apples to oranges (July is % where all critical tasks are completed while August is % of the way to fully prepared) things seem to be correlated for the long-term but uncorrelated for the short term - which to me says that they think that they are doing better than they expected.

It would be nice to get September statistics in a form commensuarbale with August statistics so we can see how the system is keeping up. FC

-- Anonymous, October 04, 1998