I have been told that the power grid runs on GPS (global positioning satellite) time, which is 13 seconds ahead of Greenwich Meantime. (sp)

I would like to validate this.

Please only respond to this thread if you can either confirm or deny this little nuance. Sources would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

:)

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), December 27, 1999

Answers

In all seriousness and with all due respect, I don't see the urgency of defining that 13 seconds. Maybe it will serve to add 13 seconds to the time of your first verse of "Where the hell were you when the Lights went out?"

-- Irving (irvingf@myremarq.com), December 27, 1999.

Irving,

Well, 13 seconds, give or take one or two, certainly doesn't matter much to ME!

What DOES matter is 7 p.m. versus midnight!

Still waiting for an answer to this one.

:)

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), December 27, 1999.

FM - time and date synchronization of the grid has been discussed ad infinitum on the euy2k forum. I think the concensus is that GPS supplied "time" reference has no real impact on grid synchronization. As to different parts of the bulk transmission system following UTC as opposed to local time, I have seen no evidence to convince me that UTC-vs-local time is much of an issue from a system operability standpoint. Rest easy in this r

-- Rick Cowles (rick@csamerica.com), December 27, 1999.

...regard (why did the last word get cut off??)

-- Rick Cowles (rick@csamerica.com), December 27, 1999.

FM, some of this depends on where they were designed and manufactured. The inventories were either not thorough enough, or at least not made public, so there is no way to guage accurately.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 27, 1999.

What possible difference would it make? The serious Y2K problems won't begin to show up for days, perhaps weeks, after the first of the year.

-- cody (cody@y2ksurvive.com), December 28, 1999.

What possible difference would it make? The serious Y2K problems won't begin to show up for days, perhaps weeks, after the first of the year.

-- cody (cody@y2ksurvive.com), December 28, 1999.

Cody, name one serious K2K problem that is going to show up days, perhaps weeks, after the first of the year. Just one.

Doug

-- Doug (Doug@itsover.com), December 28, 1999.

If the power is still on when I wake up, I'll consider it a first step. Y2K is kinda like a 12 step program. If the business world looks "OK" at the end of the day on Monday, I'll consider it a second step. Let's stop there for now.

Hi Rick!

Tick... Tock... <:00= ...

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.

Oh my God, is that Doug? Is this the same Doug, that called us a bunch of "techno-dweebs" a few days ago? The same Doug that hasn't shown his face in that thread, where he was forced to look at 875 man- years worth of programming? Take a look Doug, we've added a few more. Both there, and the original thread. I'm happy to say that we have at least 1,000 MAN-YEARS of programming experience on this forum now.

Is that you, Doug? <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.

Oh, and Doug,

You want an example? How about every billing system in the world. We have 0 year 2000 purchases, and 0 year 2000 payments, and 0 year 2000 adjustments in "this" world, now, as of today. Oh sure, we may have taken the first step, and computed a "payment due" date into 2000, but we have no REAL DATA yet! Not in this world.

Happy New Year, Doug. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.

And sorry to "mess up" your thread, FM. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.

Not a problem sysman.

Someone help me out with the translation here though. UTC means?

And...should I assume that "magic midnight" (local time) is INDEED the witching hour for electricity?

Thanks!

:)

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), December 28, 1999.

Hi FM,

Rick had previously stated in the interview with Drew Parkhill that it may be more likely that grids will have problems a few weeks past rollover, because it takes that long for faults to propagate.

Here is the quote:

"I've said this to you and a million other people: this isn't going to be a big bang on 1-1-2000.

Again, to try explain this in layman's terms: any large system has a certain amount of fault tolerance built into it. It's designed to be able to operate even if you've got some faults in there, because in a large complex system, Murphy's Law is going to be in there some place. And something's not going to be operating. So there is always a certain amount of fault tolerance.

The Western power outage in 1996 was a pretty good illustration of this. When you have multiple faults in a large complex system happening at the same time, you start to get a propogation of faults at an increasing rate over a period of time. And at some point in time that fault propogation is not linear, it goes exponential. And when that fault propogation goes exponential, that's the point where you reach critical mass and systems start failing.

As time progresses, and those faults begin building up in the system, and capacity issues start to come into play, what I'm concerned about is seeing the system absolutely stressed to a breaking point. In my worst-case scenario, if regional transmission facilities hit a critical mass of fault propogation, you're going to start seeing some real regional issues. I don't expect to see that kind of thing really play out in the first day or two after 1-1-2000. If you asked me to try to nail down a timeline, strictly off the top of my head, I'd say two weeks after 1-1-2000, and then you'll see a slow recovery for 15 or 30 days to some kind of equilibrium where you've at least got some degree of reliability just about everywhere.

You're going to see isolated dark spots here and there. You're going to see brown spots here and there. But you're going to see more light spots than brown or black spots."

Will Electricity Flow In The Year 2000? An Interview With Y2K Power Expert Rick Cowles

Rick, is this still your basic assessment?

-- mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.

Y'know, Mabel, it's been quite awhile since I read that interview (the interview was conducted in October 1998 and wasnn't published until December, 1998). I just went back and read the entire thing, and it was kind of a surreal experience. There was very little in the interview that I would change even today.

My views, as expressed in the snippet you posted above, remain pretty much unchanged.

The only place that I think I *really* missed the boat was on my read of what the NRC's actions would be w/respect to nuclear plants. But, in my own defense, the comments were made based on regulatory requirements at the time of the interview. Shortly after the interview, the NRC changed the rules. They issued an addendum to their original Y2k guidance, and this addedum removed the requirement for attestment of Y2k compliance, by a corporate officer, under oath and affirmation. That was the biggie. I knew in October 1998, during the interview, that no corporate officer of any company in any industry could sign off on corporate compliance under the threat of prosecution.

Had that requirement remained, there would be no nuclear plant in the U.S. online right now.

I also misread the regulatory environment. Without casting any stones, I think that nowadays, the regulator is too beholden to (or influenced by) the regulatee (is that a real word??).

Alas, all of the above is now a sort of poste mortem. The die was cast many months ago. All we can do is wait and see what happens, and hope that TPTB were mostly right. I won't add a "because" to the last sentence. You can fill in that blank yourself. The "because" is why we're all here.

-- Rick Cowles (rick@csamerica.com), December 28, 1999.

My expectations: still an 8.5.

Of course, I'll breathe a sigh of relief and so will the entire world. OTOH, if power stays up where I am and goes down where YOU are (and for whoever "you" is, including "you's" who live in Russia, India, Venezuela, Italy, Japan, etc), I will certainly have a bit of "nerves" (and another glass of egg nog).

Ditto for other infrastructure "events" or, hopefully, "non-events".

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), December 28, 1999.

Rick,

Thank you!!!

One question still remains: duration.

Do you have a comment on the Cameron Daley statement?

``Utilities are scared,'' said Cameron Daley, chief operating officer of Framingham, Massachusetts-based Tava/R.W. Beck, which tested and upgraded systems for more than 100 U.S. utilities. ``The whole grid won't collapse, but there will be outages that could last up to several weeks.''

Several weeks.

Utilities Say They're Y2K Ready, Though Blackouts Expected, Washington, June 30 (Bloomberg)

-- mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.