Hi,

Call me crazy (it's okay), but I'd like to know if this would work. Not that it will ever happen, and not that it's my idea (I read it who knows where? a long time ago), but I'm curious. What if...

We all agreed to take a couple weeks off during the beginning of January, and we just sort of shut America way down to minimal maintenance mode until everyone had a grip on what was happening powerwise?

The malls, office buildings, shops, factories, bowling alleys, theatres - the you-name-its - turn most of their lights off, set their thermostats to 45 or 50 degrees (whatever the safe minimum is), and just lock everything up until it was "their turn" to come back online...

Full power goes to people's homes and the infrastructure, as usual, but that's pretty much it. Or that's the starting point. If that all holds up, the "next tier" on the priority list is brought back up, etc., in some kind of order that can be monitored and backed off of if there's trouble at any stage...

Again: Not that that would ever happen (how could we possibly get through a week of life in America without the office, the mall, the bowling alley, the bar? "You mean we'd have to stay HOME!?"), and this notion may have already been beaten to death several times that I missed. But still, I'm curious. Would something like that work if the power companies were way in on it..? If an organization like NERC or the DOE "orchestrated the plan"?

-- Anonymous, April 04, 1999

Answers

Bill, many options for dealing with a potential decrease in generation capacity have been put forth here. As you noted yourself, the stumbling block is any assumption that there is time for those concerned to "buy into" the idea AND time enough to implement it.

NERC is already basing some of it's contingency plans on the fact that the 2000 rollover will occur in the winter months when generation demand is lower than in the summer months. Without going into the technical merits/non-merits of any plan, for your specific idea to be implemented would require that the Federal government and the utilities were all willing to inform the American public that such a cooperative shutdown was necessary. This would require a complete about-face from press releases made thus far, which have assured the American people that the risk of power outages is not a major one (local or regional only, according to the Senate report, less than that according to the utilities). The government has also made it clear that they are very concerned about not panicking the populace, and since a turn-off plan would likely do just that, by bringing risk awareness to everyone, I can't see how such a plan would even be contemplated.

As for whether the plan has merit, it's my understanding that load balancing is based a great deal on historical data. Too much, or too little generation versus demand can both engender problems. For such a low demand to be necessary, utilities would have to be completely convinced *ahead of time* that the available online generation would be that much less than past Jan. data indicated and that any regular margins would not suffice. They would also have to be willing to inform the public of this conviction. For that to be so would require being able to look into the future and judge with certainty the effects of a hitherto unexperienced event -- something none of us can manage. If we could do a completely accurate crystal ball feat of prognostication, then we'd all know just what needed to be done, or not done with regards to Y2K. I think post-2000 hindsight will bring about quite a lot of "maybe we should have done this" or "we should have handled it this way" for varying businesses and governments, with the biggest "should have" being "We should have addressed this issue SOONER." Whatever, with nine months to go I think government and industry courses are now set and will not be changed prior to 2000, when events may or may not force a change in plans.

-- Anonymous, April 05, 1999