This is from the Seattle Times. I haven't seen embedded issues in T&D crop up like they do here.

"But there are also many newer, date-sensitive relays on some high-voltage transmission lines - and also on some lower-voltage distribution lines running down residential streets. They, too, have been rolled forward into 2000. The only resulting problem has been that the newer relays are so smart that they issue an alarm reporting that it's not really 2000. "We tell them, `Oh, pretend that it is,' " said Underwood. There may be some power substations with embedded systems that have Year 2000 issues that have not been identified, he said."

When they say, "Oh, pretend that it is", what's the technical command/code look like for that?

Here's the link.

-- Lisa (lisa@work.now), June 03, 1999

Answers

I haven't seen an article on Y2K and electricity as thorough as this one since...January?

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 03, 1999.

It's a mistake. There are no date sensative relays that I know of or have heard about.

And no relay is that smart. There may be a conflict between the relay "date" and other equipment dates such as SCADA or an SER that is giving them an alarm. Without specifics it's hard to tell but let's just say I'm very skeptical about this whole statement.

-- The Engineer (The Engineer@tech.com), June 03, 1999.

Engineer: suppose Mr. Underwood is just looking for a way to pad the contract to TAVA/R.W. Beck? I'm gonna go look those guys up.....

-- Lisa (lisa@work.now), June 03, 1999.

Lisa, Pretty simple really, they just reset the warning light, turn off the warning buzzer and continue on with their test. As an inconsistancy in dates would have dangerous effects on the systemm the system would continue to work as usual.

And I have found in my own personal experiences that my computers listen to what I say as long as I give them a logical explaination. (And feed them regularly) *grin*

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), June 03, 1999.

[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

Posted at 08:01 p.m. PDT; Monday, May 31, 1999

Y2K: The Millennium Bug's Impact on Daily Life

Interconnection is power system's strength and weakness

by Peter Lewis
Seattle Times technology reporter

http://www.seattletimes.com/news/technology/ html98/powr_19990531.html

Every time we turn on a 60-watt bulb, somewhere in the world someone has to generate 60 watts worth of power. Now!

But when a transmission line sagged too close to a tree in Idaho in July 1996, the 60-watt bulb wouldn't turn on for about 2 million people. In fact, a series of faults - combined with record power demands resulting from hot weather - cut power to 15 Western states and parts of Canada and Mexico.

That is the concern posed by problems that could result from the Year 2000 computer glitch. The nation's power grids are huge, interconnected networks, where an episode in one part may have widespread impact in others.

The interconnectedness is a double-edged sword. Sure, it can mean the kind of harrowing incident that occurred in 1996. But it's also the reason we seldom notice when individual components fail. The system rescues itself.

Four times during two days in late April, for example, high-voltage transmission lines or generating units in Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and California "tripped" - or de-energized. No customers were affected.

"It's a rare day that doesn't see some sort of outage," says Bill Comish, Year 2000 coordinator for the Salt Lake City-based Western Systems Coordinating Council, which oversees the electric-power industry in 14 Western states, including Washington.

The interconnectedness is at the heart of Y2K efforts to ensure that the power grids work come Jan. 1. If computers and devices that help make electricity flow properly recognize the change from 1999 to 2000, the grids will continue working without a hitch.

The power industry has history on its side. Since Thomas Edison developed a system 120 years ago to make electricity and distribute it to many places at the same time, the whole system has never gone down all at once. Officials are confident that Year 2000 computer problems won't break that streak - even if some utilities falter.

Putting systems to the test

A review of efforts by Western Washington's two major electric utilities - Bellevue-based Puget Sound Energy and Seattle City Light - suggests they are working hard to make sure the year 2000 will be uneventful, electrically speaking. (And, in the case of Puget Sound Energy, for natural-gas customers.)

Both utilities say they are testing systems that are supposedly Y2K compliant.

Seattle City Light is putting its Energy Management System - the megacomputer that controls the power system - through Y2K paces even though its manufacturer, Siemens, says the system was built in 1995 to work in the 21st century. Puget Sound Energy is working with ESCA, maker of its 1997 management-system computer, to make sure it is Y2K ready.

For a dose of optimism, listen to City Light Superintendent Gary Zarker:

"There's lots of work going on, but to no one's surprise, there really aren't any show stoppers. . . . The system works. It will work. The lights are going to stay on."

As of early May, City Light was reporting about 80 percent of its most critical systems were Y2K compliant. The utility said it was difficult to provide comparable data for its "embedded systems" - devices with software burned into them. But an independent assessment by an outside contractor is under way, and the utility is confident that such systems will present no more than nuisances come New Year's Eve.

Bill Weaver, chief executive officer for Puget Sound Energy, echoes Zarker's confidence: "I'm very pleased with the progress, and we haven't run into any sticking points at all."

As of early this month, Puget Sound Energy reported that 92 percent of its critical systems were Y2K compliant. For embedded systems, the completion rate was 70 percent, the company said.

Both utilities expected to be substantially done by the end of June, but testing and continency planning will continue into the fall.

Some still have doubts

Such milestones suggest Y2K will be a nonevent, powerwise, when the calendar rolls forward. Still, recent developments raise questions:

-- As part of a series of Y2K tests, the North American Electric Reliability Council, the trade group coordinating the industry's Y2K compliance, staged a drill in April to simulate loss of communications needed to operate power grids across North America.

The results exposed some weaknesses, but, for the most part, were reassuring.

Less assuring, however, is an item from a workshop, which is also on the council's Web site, urging that the drill not be too "complex."

"We want to have a successful and meaningful story for publication," the item said.

The council's spokesman, Gene Gorzelnik, contends the quote has been taken out of context, and does not fairly represent the overall tone of the breakout sessions where the drill discussions occurred.

-- Rick Cowles, who has written a book about Y2K and the power industry, recently expressed skepticism about reports of the quickly improving rate of completion of Y2K work.

As of last November, the North American Electric Reliability Council reported utilities were 44 percent done with Y2K fixes and testing. Late last month, it said the completion rate had jumped to 75 percent.

"I'm not saying they (the figures) are unbelievable, but it certainly is astonishing they've made the progress they're reporting over the course of the last four or five months," said Cowles.

Council spokesman Gorzelnik countered: "I am not astonished that he is astonished. I - and a lot of other people who are in the media looking for balanced quotes - started discounting Rick many months ago."

-- Not until this year, and only after prompting by an outside consultant, did Seattle City Light consolidate its Y2K efforts under one office. Bellevue-based Data Dimensions said the utility was doing better than many other city agencies, but it criticized City Light's decentralized approach, saying it led to overlapping efforts, inconsistencies and discrepancies.

In the meantime, the council, which has no legal authority to force compliance, has set June 30 as the target date for finishing fixes and testing. Both local utilities expect some testing and contingency planning to continue past that date, but top officials at each are confident the lights will stay on.

Still, what's different about the Year 2000 is the potential for "common mode" failure - lots of things going wrong in lots of places at the same time - as opposed to the "random mode," or isolated, failures the grid has weathered successfully.

Also, because the power system is always in use, a full test of every component and every interconnection is not possible.

"You can't just say, `Time out! Let's have Y2K Day,' and everybody tests, and to hell with the customers," said Dale Leatherman, Y2K project manager for Puget Sound Energy. "It's like testing a heart- lung machine when the patient's in it. Better leave well enough alone."

Both Puget Sound Energy and Seattle City Light have dedicated significant staffing and have hired outside consultants for their Y2K projects. Each utility expects to spend about $18 million.

Different concerns about power

It's difficult, of course, to overstate power's significance. Take it away, and boom! Contingency plans that other utilities, businesses, governments and residential customers would just as soon keep theoretical get triggered.

Concerns about whether a PC, TV or microwave oven will misbehave suddenly seem rather petty alongside a simple question: Got juice?

For their part, though they tie into each other as part of the regional grid, City Light and Puget Sound Energy are very different players in the utility world.

Municipally owned and operated City Light generates about two-thirds of the power it distributes to roughly 700,000 customers, almost all of whom live in King County.

Privately held Puget Sound Energy purchases all of its natural gas and 80 percent of its electric power and resells it to customers. It supplies gas to about 1.25 million customers in six Western Washington counties, and electricity to roughly 2 million customers in nine counties west of the Cascades.

Y2K concerns over the natural-gas pipeline are minimal. Much of the nation's pipeline was built before computers became prevalent, and Puget Sound Energy's Leatherman describes the company's gas operation as low-tech.

On the electricity side, the company has initiated a series of "frank discussions" with its suppliers, including public-utility districts in Eastern Washington, Leatherman said.

"We ask penetrating questions about the state of their (the suppliers' Y2K) projects," he said, including what methods they've followed to ensure Year 2000 readiness.

Leatherman said he's been satisfied with the answers he's been getting.

A many-layered system

At Seattle City Light, Ralph Underwood, chief power dispatcher and acting manager of power-system operations, offered the following overview of the path electricity travels from dams to customers:

Dams along the Skagit River have control devices to raise and lower the spill gates and measure the elevation of the reservoirs. (They predate computers and have no Y2K issues.)

Water falls down a pipe from the top of the dam, and turns the blades on a turbine.

Attached to the turbine is a governor - a sort of valve that controls the flow of water. The governor's primary purpose is to adjust pressure so that power generates at 60 cycles per second.

Older governors lack date-sensitive computer chips; newer ones have them. They have already been advanced to the year 2000.

Similarly, date-sensitive, temperature-monitoring devices that attach to generators have been advanced.

When electrical current leaves the generator, it bounces over to transformers in a switching yard next to the power plant. The transformers adjust electrical pressure, or voltage, depending on consumption needs.

The juice that arrives at your home or office is not the charge originally generated. Rather, it is power continuously regenerated and transmitted as it arrives at, and departs from, a series of transformers in between.

The miles of poles and wires that form the electrical-power transmission and distribution system don't care what the date is.

However, there are protective relays throughout the system, and some of them do care. Much like the circuit breaker in your house, they are engineered to sense when a line gets too hot, and to trip the line when that occurs.

The vast majority of such protective relays are electromechanical devices that predate computers. But there are also many newer, date- sensitive relays on some high-voltage transmission lines - and also on some lower-voltage distribution lines running down residential streets. They, too, have been rolled forward into 2000.

The only resulting problem has been that the newer relays are so smart that they issue an alarm reporting that it's not really 2000. "We tell them, `Oh, pretend that it is,' " said Underwood.

There may be some power substations with embedded systems that have Year 2000 issues that have not been identified, he said.

As a safeguard, both City Light and Puget Sound Energy have turned to TAVA/R.W. Beck, a Seattle-based consultant that specializes in embedded-system assessment.

TAVA CEO Don LeMaster declined to talk about specific clients. (Puget Sound Energy initially agreed to allow The Seattle Times to speak directly with TAVA, but later withdrew its permission, saying it would violate corporate policy.)

In general, LeMaster said his company's approach is to get "down to the (circuit) board level" and search for date-sensitive codes. When such codes are discovered, "you simply replace it or do a workaround," he said.

LeMaster also noted that, compared with power plants that require fossil fuels, the hydro plants that provide the bulk of the power here "are a whole lot simpler from a control standpoint. . . . You don't need power to start them up, so we (the Northwest) are blessed that way."

Utilities coordinate backup plans

Puget Sound Energy and Seattle City Light are developing contingency plans with other utilities, including Bonneville Power Administration.

Washington state utilities are in the Northwest power pool, a subset of the Western Systems Coordinating Council - one of 10 regional reliability councils that form the North American Electric Reliability Council.

The western council sets the rules for the Western Interconnection, one of three major grids in North America. The other two are the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and the Eastern Interconnection.

Regarding contingency plans, the western council's Comish and local utility Y2K experts make these points:

-- Because New Year's Eve will fall on a Friday night during a holiday weekend, customer demand will be relatively low. This means the grid will operate in a relatively "unloaded," less-stressed state.

-- Extra staff will be on hand to monitor the system and will be available to operate equipment manually if computers fail. Seattle City Light has successfully operated generators with its primary computer down.

-- Offline generators will be instantly available to power up if those already online need help.

-- As much as possible, utilities will try to operate self- sufficiently, minimizing export and import of power across the grid.

Comish noted that it's important to remember that every system in the universe has its limits. "Because a large, interconnected power system is much stronger than a small, isolated system, we try to remain interconnected for as long as possible," he said. "However, when we reach a point where all we accomplish by remaining interconnected is to drag everyone down, we `island' " - meaning separate from the grid.

Islanding prevents the further spread of the disturbance. In islands that contain a balance of customer demand and generation, the disturbance is quickly arrested and customers will probably see no more than a few flickers of the lights.

In islands where this balance is not achieved, something has to give. "Sometimes customers have to be interrupted to allow the generation in the island to balance with the remaining customer demand," Comish said, noting that in 1996, the system interrupted service for a couple of million customers to spare the entire Western region from blacking out.

When the system is heavily loaded - as it was twice in the summer of '96 - and it experiences multiple contingencies, the results can be harrowing.

"This is why," said Comish, "we intend to operate the system in a very lightly loaded condition on New Year's Eve. It will take a lot of contingencies to lead to a major problem."

City Light's Zarker doesn't expect to use it, but notes that Seattle has an ace up its sleeve. About a third of the utility's power is drawn from its facilities on the Skagit River. In the event the utility were forced to separate from the grid, Zarker says, the Skagit could probably carry Seattle.

Peter Lewis's phone-message number is 206-464-2217.

Copyright ) 1999 Seattle Times Company

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), June 03, 1999.

Western Systems Coordinating Council (WSCC) - promotes regional electric service reliability through the development of planning and operating reliability criteria and policies; monitoring of compliance; and the facilitation of a regional transmission planning process.

http://www.wscc.com/

List of WSCC Member Systems/Hotlinks

http://www.wscc.com/ members.htm

News Regarding Power Outages

http://www.wscc.com/ outages.htm

Year 2000 Information

http://www.wscc.com/y2k.htm

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), June 03, 1999.

Hi Lisa. I, too, am a bit confused about what exactly was meant. Here's my best shot: When he said "pretend it is Year 2000," he probably meant to forward the clock in the relay into the year 2000 and see if it goes into the alarm state. The command to do this depends entirely on the type of relay. Some use "terminal" mode, others allow changing the date using special comm software that has a windows pop-up selection that says "synchronize PC clock with relay clock". These are just a few examples.

Anyway, most newer digital relays do perform self-checks and if they find a problem, they will close a contact that can be used to remotely inform an operator of a problem. In all the tests we've done, when the device goes to the year 2000, they do not go into the alarm state. Maybe they were referring to the remote transmitting unit also having its clock rolled forward, and were seeing if an alarm signal pass through the remote unit properly.

I hope this helps.

-- Dan the Power Man (dgman19938@aol.com), June 03, 1999.

Cherri,

There's a name for your procedure (". . .just reset the warning light, turn off the warning buzzer and continue on with their test").

It's called The Smoke Test!

In one of its earlier incarnations it was carried out by inserting a copper penny behind a blown fuse in a fuse box. . .

-- Hardliner (searcher@internet.com), June 03, 1999.

what makes the difference what date it is when it comes to power? i know it makes a difference when it comes to date related things like checks and other dated material.

-- wondering (just @wondering.com), June 03, 1999.