The title of the following article was misleading to me...

Can Y2K turn power off? Plants will try to find out

Since power plants are running a contingency drill on limited communications, how will this test Y2K's chance of turning the power off?

-- Anonymous, April 08, 1999

Answers

As I understand the test, all participants will have already made whatever switching or adjusting they need to do so that a telecommunication loss among terminals will have no impact.

Unless there's a connection between automated control and telecommunications that no one has thought of somewhere, it won't.

I'm more interested in seeing if somebody doesn't cause a crash when he stands too close to an embedded chip, or digital circuit somewhere when he keys up his radio, and the RF emission gets into the circuitry. Hard to spot.

-- Anonymous, April 09, 1999

Very good observation about RFI. Good news and bad news - Bad news first. RFI can just as easily impact the generation of TTL and CMOS logic that predates micro-controllers or the dreaded "e-word". Good news - the protection and control device manufacturers have know about this for YEARS and perform extensive testing in the design phases of product development (yes, TYPE testing).

Hand-held radios are used in power plants every day with no problems. The communication tests will see an increase in the use of satellite phones to relay SCADA data from substations. I believe these must be set up outside, and the substation control house and grounding cage should provide enough shielding to protect the relays and other devices from RFI. High powered radios are used everyday in substations, where the trucks park just outside the control house building. No problems.

Bottom line, this is an area for prudent and cautious use of commo devices, but it will have no impact on Y2K related activities.

-- Anonymous, April 09, 1999

"Good news -...TYPE testing)."

Good news, indeed, Art. I was aware that RFI can be a potential problem in some cases (it's happened to me, and a few others I've talked to; some hams have been concerned about using high power in their late model vehicles), but, since I don't work in the EU industry, I'm ignorant of their ability to handle it.

Thanks very much for the input.

-- Anonymous, April 12, 1999