I'm pasting the story, because these late night links have a tendency to 'expire' by morning.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/tc/story.html?s=v/nm/19990410/tc/y2k_utilities_2.html

North American Power Grid Passes First Y2K Drill

By Patrick Connole

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North American utilities, in the first of two continent-wide drills to test their communications systems, said Friday preliminary results showed back-up programs were not infected by the Year 2000 computer bug.

``The drill gave us a better sense of our strengths and weaknesses, in terms of our communications contingency plans,'' said Michael Knapp, manager of transmission for American Electric Power, a large, multi-state Midwest utility.

``While we found no major problems with our backup systems, the exercise helped us to identify areas that worked well, in addition to pinpointing areas that could be improved.''

Other utilities said they were pleased with drill results. Detroit Edison, Michigan's largest electric utility, said the dependability of its back-up system was reaffirmed after the drill, as well as those of its utility partners.

The drill marked the first of two major tests under the supervision of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), an umbrella organization responsible for ensuring power is always available to anyone hooked up to the grid.

More than 3,000 electric utilities, all of the system operators in the United States and Canada, participated in the first of the two mammoth drills that grid operators think will prepare them for any Year 2000 electric system failures.

Friday's drill was chosen to correspond to the 99th day of 1999. And likewise, the second will come on another date thought to be key to testing computer systems -- Sept. 9, 1999.

Electric power officials said many computer systems in the past were programmed to shut off after reading a series of ''nines,'' and could disrupt operations akin to the feared Year 2000 bug, or Y2K for short.

Y2K is a remnant of computer programmers' decisions to denote a year using only its last two digits. It is thought many systems will fail when the new millennium starts and the ``00'' of 2000 is misread as ``1900.''

Officials said utilities have been testing and fixing their equipment for months to avoid any major problems on New Year's Day.

Electric utilities are expected under the government's computer bug program to be Y2K-compliant by June 30. Friday's test did not affect regular power supply.

Since early this morning and into the afternoon, utilities pretended they had no computerized network for sharing vital data on power transmission flows.

Operating the grid could be jeopardized if utilities lost the ability to coordinate power loads and flow rates on the transmission system that links them all together.

Instead, they fed data to the NERC and 136 control centers using old-fashioned equipment, like walkie-talkies, analog data computation systems, and by deploying crews to read meters and chart electricity use by hand.

``This is all of us getting together to pretend that we've lost our communications, and the normal data channels coming out of the plants,'' said John Castagna, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute.

``We are trying to make sure if something strange is going to happen on January 1, we will know how to react,'' he said.

An in-depth analysis by NERC of drill results was expected within three weeks, officials said.

Jessica Brown, a spokesman for Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), said the company's back-up systems worked ``very, very well'' during the first hours of the day-long drill.

BGE staff physically visited monitoring stations and used non-computerized telephones to call data into a main collection point, where power usage rates were manually tabulated.

``These crews thought it was great, having to actually write things down,'' Brown said.

In a quarterly report delivered in January to the U.S. Department of Energy, NERC said it expected no major breakdowns in the delivery of power at the start of 2000, noting utilities would be free from the threat of major regional blackouts.

A second NERC report to DOE is due at the end of April.

-- Deborah (infowars@yahoo.com), April 10, 1999

Answers

Well, . . .it will be interesting to read what Jim Lord and others have to say about this. I'm certain there will be some opinions.

After all--if there's anything we've learned from Y2k, it might be that, "For every opinion there truly is an equal and opposite criticism!"

:)

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), April 10, 1999.

Who cares what Jim Lord has to say. I'd like to see more people use their critical thinking process to come up with their own conclusions.

-- Bored (Iwonder@whatGaryNorthWill.say), April 10, 1999.

1) this was NOT a TEST, theis was a DRILL. One passes TESTS one ENJOYS (or not) DRILLS

2) They have demonstrated that they can communicate, and they believe that they can control the grid interfaces.

3) They worked against the standard daily variability of the grid interfaces. They didn't indicate that they were working against the very likely scenario of rapidly changing draw values in the grid structure. These rapid changes are what will toast equipment, or so I'm reliably led to believe.

However, they have a successful drill to crow about. Anyone who starts to say they passed a test and are therefor virtually compliant is spinning faster than willie can unzip.

chuck

-- Chuck, a night driver (reinzoo@en.com), April 10, 1999.