Y2K: On alert for little problems

By Adam Gifford

When people wake up to the impact of the Y2K bug the most frequent question is whether the power will stay on.

The answer is most probably yes, says Rob Scott, head of grid company Transpower's Year 2000 project and chairman of the Electricity Industry Year 2000 Focus Group.

"We are reasonably confident we will do all we can, but with Y2K you can never fully guarantee you have got everything.

"I don't see a scenario of blackouts. Major disruption is unlikely.

"There are likely to be small, localised problems."

The electrical supply industry is spending about $100 million to fix the problem, with Transpower's $8.2 million project on time and on budget.

Most of the larger companies have almost completed the remedial stage - fixing problems - and are now working on contingency plans.

"The required people will be on standby, and in some cases will take over manual control if required," Mr Scott said. "Organisations are making sure they have access to technical expertise which would normally not be available on such short notice."

Fears that some of the smaller companies may be caught napping are groundless, because most rely on older equipment which is electromechanical rather than digital and therefore not subject to Year 2000 problems.

The big issue in the industry is chips or microprocessors embedded in devices that perform mechanical functions. The clues to whether a device has a chip are there being some sort of battery or permanent power supply, memory capacity to store information, and an executable code that knows about dates and processing.

"The problems with microprocessors which have been identified are very limited," Mr Scott said. "They've largely been with data loggers which log the date and time of an event, so it would not cause disruption of equipment if they recorded an erroneous date."

The electricity industry already assumed a one-in-three chance that there would be a failure in any given day, so duplicated systems were the norm.

And when the century rolls over in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere summer "we're a lot better off than the Northern Hemisphere - we have about 50 per cent spare generation."

"Then we've got a single transmission network owned by a single company, whereas other countries have several companies and several different interfaces."

Mr Scott's views are endorsed by embedded systems specialist Richard Donaldson, a 20-year electricity service veteran.

His company, Utility Services Associates, has helped a number of utilities and manufacturers with Year 2000 work.

Mr Donaldson said the concern about embedded chips arose because while the risks were low, the impact of failure was high.

"The key is to prove as far as possible the system is ready and then do contingency planning. If industrial companies do that with their process control they should be okay."

While large companies understood what contingency meant, smaller companies still had not got their heads around it.

Mr Donaldson said most of the problems he had seen so far meant a device was only putting out incorrect information, and unless it was hooked up to some other system which automatically processed that information it was unlikely to have a major impact.

"I have not seen a single problem which would interrupt supply, but there could be a sequence of problems which could escalate to a bigger problem.

"It may be piece of bad or confusing information presented to an operator, who then makes a bad decision."