Hi all,

I just would like to announce that the company I am working for (utiliy in the north of Spain providing electricity for a population of 1 million people) will be 95% compliant by the end of this month, and that we are developing our contingency plans based on NERC and other electrical institues here in Europe (Unipede, etc.). We have found problems with some Scada systems that we have taken care of (reversing clocks, changing operating systems and so on), some embedded chip problems (not big deal, and already fixed by ABB and other companies), and some problems with the telecom systems (trunking system generating alarm rings in wrong order, files being overwritten etc, but nothing that cannot be fixed by reversing the clock again). The point is that most of the work has been done, and we found nothing that could make people scared (besides, the assertions made here about operating manually match our conclussions, in the sense that we could do without scadas for a short period until the problems are fixed).

Now, the other 50% of my post is O.T. (bear with me, Rick): I am just wondering if some utility folks out there could give me a hand with this problem I came across with; as you guys may know, Spain is in the process of deregulation too, and utilities here are trying to decide how to share the costs involved in the distribution; in order to do that, we are building a model of the grid, including rural areas, urban, high, medium, and low voltages. At this stage we are dealing with medium voltage in urban areas, trying to place substations along the city area perimeter feeding power to transformation centers and medium voltage clients; the solution for the problem would be the lowest cost grid, including algorithms to find the lowest cost path covering all the consuming points, and the best locations to place the substations. The question is: is there any software that you may know of, or any other solution already implemented that we could use as starting point??? perhaps EPRI or other institution over there have already proposed something??

I would appreciate your comments on this.

Regards

Carlos Fernandez

-- Anonymous, June 18, 1999