Spot Checking Our 3,000 Utilities

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Electric Utilities and Y2K : One Thread

Mr. Steven Belsky has responded to me, regarding my inquiry for a link to the text of a CNN article. Roleigh Martin assisted me in this search with his Post #1507 on 10/27 at: http://webalias.com/roleigh

CNN has reported, on 10/27 and again today on 10/30, that "the Energy Department has spot-checked the Y2K status of just 56 of the nation's 3,000 electric utilities. And there's been virtually no independent confirmation that the country's 56,000 community water suppliers are up to snuff." A transcript of this entire article may be read (on pages 5-6 after the La Nina article) at:

http://cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/9910/30/stc.00.html

My sincere thanks to Mr. Belsky, who somehow located this transcript for all of us. I have emailed CNN twice, requesting a transcript or information regarding their sources, but they have not replied to me at all. -Jim Young jyoung@famvid.com

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999

Answers

Jim, Thanks for the link. I did note that the CNN report pointed out that the 103 nuclear power plants had NRC audits. What wasn't mentioned was that the Senate 100 day report noted that "only about 60% of the companies are using independent review to validate and confirm their results". I don't have the figures in front of me, but I think that the percentages are > 90% for companies having had some kind of audits of their Y2K projects, either internal or external. I have a summary with links of electric utility survey information - whos responded, how many have not, etc, from both the Senate report and from various industry organizations. If anyones interested, I can post (I just need to edit it a bit).

Regards,

-- Anonymous, October 31, 1999


Thank you, FactFinder (or Rick Cowles?). Yes! I would be extremely interested in seeing a "summary with links of electric utility survey information - who's responded, how many have not."

My wife and I live in Springfield, Illinois. Our electrical grid is the "Main" grid, I believe. Our electricity is from Springfield's City Water Light & Power Co.; our gas is from CILCO.

After ten months of intensive "layman research" of y2k, we have decided to use virtually all of our small savings in order to cover the bases for 3-4 weeks of independent household operation. (We hope it doesn't come to that.)

In any case, having made this agonizing contingency decision, we would be very interested in any y2k-related information that might include our own hometown utilities. Not that we might therefore feel any safer, considering the possible multiple causes of power outages...

Incidentally (just FYI), regarding the spot checking of only 56 of the nation's 3000 electric utilities, "MitchLer" has today posted a comment on CNN's Year 2000 bug, discussion message board. He wrote: "Electric utilities and water companies are regulated, generally, by state public utility commissions. They generally receive oversight at the state level. The fact that there hasn't been much federal auditing isn't surprising because the feds don't have jurisdiction. Of course, how well the state regulators have done in auditing for Y2K isn't all that clear...some states will do better than others..." From what he has written in previous posts, MitchLer is apparently a programmer, 20 years in programming, with experience in COBOL and Assembler, and embedded processors.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 1999


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