Rick,

For various reasons I have been unable to respond to your reply of my questions to you. Since you pledged no further public comment, I saw no pressing need or value in making it a priority, even though your reply showed that I did not make my questions clear. Given the wide play my questions have been given by Lane, I thought I'd invest a moment to respond and clarify.

Lets first define power delivery. Theres three major components to a typical regioinal power delivery system: generation, transmission, and distribution.

Good idea, in a seperate thread I will address two of the three areas I am directly responsible for test/remediation and attempt to explain why NO EVIDENCE exists that would point to failures in this area. As for generation, the "body of work" that exists here from Fact Finder and Malcom (et al) will suffice for the 3rd area, generation.

Before I go on, I must respond to the following question and your response:

5. Will you release the specific equipment model and failure mode so effective remediation can be implemented?

This is a somewhat disingenuous request, and you know it. ;-)

NO, this is not a disingenuous request (ingenuous?), AND YOU know it. ;-) Your opinion carries weight because of your background and experience in nuclear and utility consulting work. I infer that you therefore base your conclusions and opinions on observations of actual failures in the Transmission and Distribution sectors of the utility. I feel certain that others here have the same perception. They ask me for independant auditors to verify my claims of testing successes. I am asking you to either give us utility guys a clue or admit that you have not observed any fatal device failures that would trip the Transmission or Distribution system or DIRECTLY cause a lights out failure at the rollover or after.

From a Y2k perspective, I expect disruptions in each of the three major components, somewhere in every geographic region on the planet.

What do you call a disruption (from Y2K)? If you mean having to manually reset the date of an embedded device when it doesn't recognize leap year then we agree. The good people of this forum look to you for wisdom and guidance(whether you desire or deserve this role is quite irrelevant and has been for some time)as they attempt to discern the impact of Y2K on their lives. They want to understand the risks, and they don't care if a protective relay or event recorder reads 3/1 on 2/29. They want to know if they will have light and heat.

I am sorry that my question regarding reliability, dependability and security AND safety margin used technical terms with very specific meanings in the power system protection and control area. While your answers are accurate, they are quite unrelated to what I asked. I assumed from the quote you were talking protective relaying. Lane thinks it's great, but your answer was to a different question and to attempt the discussion would be too technically specific to an important but obscure speciality. My error, disregard the question.

All the average person needs to understand is that most operationally important process control systems in any business or industry wont quit operating because of a single failure in the system. This is because there is a degree of fault tolerance built into every important control system, regardless of the industry. When the inherent fault tolerance of complex systems becomes saturated, the system begins to fail. Sometimes this fault tolerance saturation is instantaneous (such as in the San Francisco example), sometimes it takes a long time to play out (such as in the Western U.S. power outage from several years ago).

Just to set the record straight, in the SF outage the protection and control system worked as designed. Human error caused the control systems to properly sense and respond to artifically created symptoms that exactly matched power system condition that the system was to protect against. Several human mistakes triggered a coincidence of errors that aligned precisely to trigger not only first, but second contingency protection layers.

I arrived at this conclusion as no more than an educated SWAG based on my own analysis of the data and observations that Ive compiled while actually working on the problem for clients - much the same way that many electric industry personnel have derrived that there will be zero impact.

Glad to see you admit that the 2 week statement is a WAG (can't figure what the "S" means). I have given the best and most detailed summaries of my test findings that my conscience permits. I have discussed the scope and nature of my test program and the nature of the rare cosmetic failures I have found. With these results, I confidantly project zero false trips (lights out) due to embedded device failures on the T&D system. You have independant data and observations that leads to a radically different conclusion. Truth cannot contradict truth, so there is an error somewhere. The intent of my original post was to prompt a discussion of the methods, results and logic that lead to the divergent conclusions.

The questions were serious and genuine. The intent was constructive dialogue.

-- Anonymous, December 16, 1999

Answers

OOPS. Where did my (snips) go??? I guess that > < is HTML for "make this confusing by hiding the snip marks"???

Sorry.

-- Anonymous, December 16, 1999