Riley, operations director of the agency known as the California Independent System Operator, has negotiated his way past a receptionist, security cameras and roving guards to reach Mission Control, buried in an unmarked building in a look-alike office park in suburban Sacramento.

At the threshold of the grid's command center, he high-fives a fingerprint scanner. A green laser reads his unique pattern of fingerprint whorls and palm creases to satisfy the grid's computer - Y2K compliant, of course - that the man standing at the door is really Ed Riley. The boss.

Click. Enter.

Windowless and larger than a movie theater, the room could be the set for the next James Bond thriller.

Workers confer in whispers at 12 banks of computers. They are dwarfed by a mosaic map of California's power grid and its extensions from British Columbia to Baja. The map extends 160 feet - so long the wall must bend to accommodate it.

By itself, the California grid is the fifth largest in the world.

Yet, it is but one corner of the nation's electrical system power - an omnipresent but poorly understood web of generating plants, transmission lines and transformers that combine to make North American cities and towns twinkle like stars in a galaxy.

Now, Y2K fears have bestowed another description on the power grid:

Vulnerable.

"The grid is only as strong as its weakest member," said Rick Cowles, a New Jersey-based utilities consultant who testified at Senate Y2K hearings. "The first end-to-end test we'll have is during the actual transition to January 1."

Riley can't worry about the entire nation. His job is to keep the most populous state from plunging into a blackout at the dawn of the new millennium.

Every four seconds, he receives a status report on the constant torrent of electrons as they are generated at 700 power plants and race down transmission lines spanning 124,000 square miles.

His system crackles with 46,000 megawatts of juice serving 27 million of the world's most energy-insatiable consumers. Every light bulb. Every coffee maker. Every computer. Every curling iron.

About 600 billion billion (that's right: 600 billion billion) electrons a second must flow through the filament of a 100-watt bulb so you and your child can read about Harry Potter's latest adventures at the Wizard School. Until the lights flicker, few people think about what it takes to keep them on.

Utility operators in California and nationwide hope to keep it that way. They are confident that Y2K will pass without a catastrophic power outage, or at least one of their own making.

The industry has spent as much as $4.5 billion to replace or reprogram computers that might have otherwise convulsed at the stroke of 2000. Some individual utilities required $70 million in repairs.

Large portions of the national grid, including California's system, passed a Y2K simulation on September 9. Since then the U.S. Department of Energy and other agencies have certified that the grid - including nuclear stations - poses no significant worries.

Y2K should be.......

snip

http://www.billingsgazette.com/business/991222_bus04.html

-- Anonymous, December 22, 1999