Confused once again

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Electric Utilities and Y2K : One Thread

Rick, I read the CBN interview and I am very confused. At the end of the interview you said that you didnt expect Major problems to last more than a couple of weeks. I will be the first to admit that I know absolutely NOTHING about all this power info, but I have been preparing for y2k for over 8 months. My question is, I have been preparing very hard for a long time but if you only expect problems for a couple of weeks than in your opinion, am I going overboard expecting things to be really bad? I know you dont have a crystal ball, but I respect your opinion. Thanks for your help in advance. ( also could you please answer me in English)

-- Anonymous, January 06, 1999

Answers

Hi Cecilia, I think you focused on the words "two weeks" and didn't read carefully what the context of the paragraph was. The "two weeks" mentioned by Rick was his rough guesstimate of how long it might take for multiple faults throughout the electric systems to reach a critical mass and start large regional failures because of the many stresses on the system. In other words, he doesn't necessarily think all the lights will go out, slam bang, on Jan.1, 2000, but the worst may well hit a couple weeks later. Then there will be a period of working towards recovery for another few weeks.

Here's the pertinent paragraph where the "two weeks" is mentioned. Re-read it and I think you'll see he is estimating when the worst might hit, not the length of any outages:

When you have multiple faults in a large complex system happening at the same time, you start to get a propogation of faults at an increasing rate over a period of time. And at some point in time that fault propogation is not linear, it goes exponential. And when that fault propogation goes exponential, that's the point where you reach critical mass and systems start failing.

As time progresses, and those faults begin building up in the system, and capacity issues start to come into play, what I'm concerned about is seeing the system absolutely stressed to a breaking point. In my worst-case scenario, if regional transmission facilities hit a critical mass of fault propogation, you're going to start seeing some real regional issues. I don't expect to see that kind of thing really play out in the first day or two after 1-1-2000. If you asked me to try to nail down a timeline, strictly off the top of my head, I'd say two weeks after 1-1-2000, and then you'll see a slow recovery for 15 or 30 days to some kind of equilibrium where you've at least got some degree of power flowing through the grids."

He is also not talking about a "back to normal" situation, but decreased generation with some major corporate users out of the loop (blacked out, no power, zip, nada) and power rationed to emergency services and home owners.

He also mentions serious concerns about generation capabilities throughout the summer months of 2000 (as has Dick Mills in his columns). In short, my take of his overall assessment is that there will likely be power issues (a nice word for problems) almost throughout the year of 2000, and some regional areas will experience more severe problems than others.

Here's one way to get a summary of the points Rick made in the interview. Print it off, get a pencil, and circle each statement in each section which addresses potential problems. Then put them all together and you'll see that there are many areas where Year 2000 problems could erupt, and the total areas of possible failures which could affect electricity production are definitely cause for preparation and concern - at least in my opinion. The interconnections are too vast for there to be any possibility of predicting what will happen with exactness. The common sense thing to do is to prepare, because that is the only way to safely address all these potential trouble spots.

If I've confused you even more, let me know, and I'll try to post a point-by-point replay of of the possible problems mentioned in the interview and leave out all the tech-talk.

-- Anonymous, January 06, 1999


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