Rick: Inquiring Minds Want to Know (About NERC)

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Um, the press is reporting NERC report and NERC officials as saying "no problemo" with Y2K. Victory declared, the war is over. The villagers are pacified. The .... well, you get the picture.

Look, I'm delighted if it tis so. Tis it, oh fearless leader and prognosticator of all things utile?

-- Anonymous, January 11, 1999

Answers

See my post made under "January 99 nerc report now online" for possible contradicting conclusions re interdependency on telcos... and concern about lack of specific details on what contingencies are being planned for.

By the way...the Abrams transcript report appears to have dissappeared from the USIA website...funny how the mainstream press has not picked up on it yet....or maybe we were not meant to see or know about it just quite yet...

-- Anonymous, January 11, 1999


The new NERC report implies that utilities are 44% through with remediation and testing. This appears to be inconsistant with Bonnie Camp's review of the SEC 10Q reports. Bonnie, could you comment on this? Is the NERC report consistant with the 10Qs?

-- Anonymous, January 11, 1999

Steve, I haven't had time to study the NERC report, but a quick perusal just now did indicate their completion percentages are definitely not in line with the SEC 10Q filings. The base of respondents for the NERC study included non-public utilities, so there is a difference. However, if the percentages the utilities submitted to NERC are an accurate assessment of their progress, then I personally can only believe there must have been a *phenomenal* amount of work done in the two months between the end of September and the end of November.

Part Two of my Commentary has been submitted to Rick and I'm awaiting his response as to when he will be able to put it onsite. I hope to be able to study the NERC report soon and decipher their definitions and projections, but family responsibilities have of necessity reduced my computer time the last few days. There's going to be a lot more to say about this report, by a lot of people, including myself. It's just going to take awhile.

Keep in mind what I mentioned in the first part of my guest commentary: everyone writing a report brings to it their own bias. I endeavored to let people know how I approached dealing with the statistics reported by the utilities. It will help to consider what bias the NERC formulators might have had - and the bias of the reporting utilities. Best wishes to you!

-- Anonymous, January 11, 1999


I too found the Abrams report missing yesterday (10 Jan.) But this morning (and just now too) it's available as before.

The most reliable route, I think, is to open USIA's The Public Diplomacy Query (PDQ) database, enter Y2K in the search window, and [search]. Log in is not required. The Abrams transcript is now the second item on the list. It seems unchanged.

Only way to be sure to keep it is to save it to disk.

-- Anonymous, January 11, 1999


Unfortunately, I'm not going to have the time to give it a good going over until later this week or the beginning of next; the "day job" is consuming all of my time this week.

My initial reaction is that it's not much different than I expected - a glass half full analysis, with very little critical review by the media before rushing off to the phones and declaring that "all is well" in the industry.

The 44% aggregate figure is a concern. To meet NERC's agressive schedule, the industry needed to be 52% toward testing and remediation at this point. That's an 8% differential, and will be tough to make up. I haven't had the chance to think about how that squares with Bonnie's earlier analysis.

More to come...

-- Anonymous, January 12, 1999



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