From Reuters on Yahoo- For Educational/Research Purposes Only

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Winter is coming and so is y2k. I hope they fix this quickly.

Monday August 30, 5:38 pm Eastern Time

Coal stocks improve at AES' Northeast power plants

NEW YORK, Aug 30 (Reuters) - International energy giant AES Corp. (NYSE:AES - news) said Monday railroad operators Norfolk Southern Corp. (NYSE:NSC - news) and CSX Inc. (NYSE:CSX - news) seem to have fixed their Northeast U.S. coal distribution problems following the breakup of Conrail.

``We were very concerned for the last couple of weeks. At worst we were down to four or five days of coal in inventory -- that's only about 6,000 tons. But, Norfolk seems to have turned things around and is responding very well to our needs,'' AES' manager of the Greenidge coal-fired power plant in New York, Doug Roll, said.

``We like to go into winter -- December through February -- with about 80,000 to 100,000 tons of coal in inventory -- that will last about two and a half months,'' Roll said.

The $10.3 billion breakup of Conrail on June 1, 1999, which held a monopoly on rail traffic in the Northeast, led to severe bottlenecks in the delivery of raw materials and other goods in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England.

``As we understand it, every coal-fired power plant in Pennsylvania and New York had trouble getting coal shipments following the breakup of Conrail. This problem was not exclusive to AES and its six plants in New York,'' President of AES New York Dan Rothaupt said.

AES experienced severe problems at two of its smaller New York power plants, the 126-megawatt (MW) Westover and the 161-MW Greenidge, forcing AES to make a formal complaint to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board.

``Those two plants require special bottom-loading railroad cars, which are difficult to off-load in the winter. We needed to get the coal inventory up at those plants before winter hits,'' Rothaupt said.

Heavy electricity usage during one of the hottest July's on record compounded the coal shortage at these plants because they were burning more coal than usual during the summer, Rothaupt said.

``All of the utilities in the old Conrail territory did not receive the service they needed, which is regular coal distributions,'' Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband said.

``We experienced severe growing pains (with the acquisition of part of the Conrail lines) and we're still working diligently to provide the type of service our customers deserve,'' Husband said, adding Norfolk Southern would not predict when it may solve its distribution problems.

-- Anonymous, August 30, 1999

Answers

It's kind of interesting to look at the Energy Information Agency website, and peruse some of the fuel statistics - it's quite clear that there's a significant increase of fuel "on hand" stocks (and "on order") from this time last year. There's several different ways to view this information on EIA's website, so I'll just provide a general pointer: EIA Website. For those of you inclined to research, there's a tremendous amount of data and information on EIA's website. It's definitely a good bo

-- Anonymous, August 30, 1999

How much time do you think these railroads put into Y2k remediation while under the pressure of the Conrail breakup? They obviously had exteme difficulty delivering coal to the utilities while just breaking their computer systems into seperate companies. Makes you wonder how they had time to fix Y2K.

Of course the electric utilities will be okay, "as long as our suppliers are okay."

-- Anonymous, August 31, 1999

One Conrail worker told me as far as he was concerned, Y2K had already struck at Conrail. Not that the problem was Y2K related, but that their systems were devastated during the transition of ownership. I'm sure programmers were hard at work on fixing the existing problems and not Y2K.

-- Anonymous, August 31, 1999

JUST-A-SIDE-NOTE: The NEW Farmer's Almanac (on the shelf this week) forecast EXTREMELY SEVER weather for the northeast for Dec '99/Jan'00. Sure glad most of my family is in Texas and I'm not on the road in a "big rig" anymore.

-- Anonymous, September 01, 1999