Rick,

I read an article last week (in which I believe your wrote) about power being out for a month - then dirty power for a year. If this was your comment can you send me the link.

Thanks Lee

-- Anonymous, May 13, 1999

Answers

Lee,

Either the article you refer to wasn't written by me, or it's old news. If it was written by me, I'm sure someone will be *kind* enough to research and post a link. ;-) I honestly don't remember that one.

You might want to take a look at my interview with Drew Parkhill of CBN News at: http://www.cbn.org/y2k/cowles.htm

That interview pretty much stands on its own, even after 6 months passage of time (gee, Drew, has it been that long??).

-- Anonymous, May 13, 1999

See http://home.ica.net/~njarc/Docs/ckpower499.html for a discussion of the story you might remember.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 1999

Snyder, thanks - the pointer at least gives me something to work with. Please note that the info "from me" there actually is from Cory Hamasaki, and you have to understand Cory's loosey-goosey writing style. In other words, I never said "refrigerators are going to blow up". :-) (Boy, that would be pretty hard to do anyway unless you wired a little C4 to the compressor.)

The context of our conversation was: my gut feeling is that there may be challenges to power over the course of the entire year, for Y2k and other reasons that have been discussed in this forum. Does that mean that your power is going to be out for the entire year?? Of course not. What I was getting at is reliability issues, and that continuity of power to your electric meter might not be as reliable as it has been in recent years past.

Y2k, in confluence with deregulation, deferred maintenance due to cost cutting, and solar cycle 23, have the potential to gang up on us all at once. Eventually, deregulation and deferred maintenance issues will catch up with the industry, and there have been many studies indicating that reliability will suffer. It is my earnest hope that next year is not the year that it *all* comes together.

Most of we boomers have grown up in an era where, unless there's a severe storm, power is there when we flip a switch. Our increased reliance on technology in *every* aspect of our lives dictates the need for as close to uninterruptible power as we can get. And what I'm saying is that we have this great big cosmic confluence of events that's about to hit the industry, and that the electric industry itself is starting to sail in uncharted waters. These things can not help but present a reliability challenge to the industry.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 1999