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This is the most frightening document I have seen since I began my site.
I have said that Western Civilization will not survive if the power grids go down. The U.S. power grid is probably going down if this report is true.
The
California White Paper says that awareness is 1% of a y2k repair project. Inventory is 1%. This report says that the U.S. nuclear power power companies are at the inventory stage with regard to embedded chips. These plants supply 20% of the nation's power; 40% in the east. The grid has perhaps 15% excess capacity, says Rick Cowles. A shutdown would put the grid into the negative side nationally, and way negative regionally.
The California White Paper did not factor in embedded chips. It may be that the same project percentages do not apply. But this is no cause for optimism. Embedded chips over three years old are almost
impossible to replace. So, it may be worse than the California White Paper estimates for software revisions. All power companies are heavily dependent on embedded chips and processors.
The nuclear power industry looks as though it won't meet the deadline. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will have to shut the plants down in late 1999. We will lose this power before 2000. This will take place just before 2000, which is expected to be a bad year for
solar flares and the accompanying disruption of power transmission.
What is true of the nuclear industry may also be true of the conventional power industry: the inventory stage for chips. This industry is crucial for our survival, but we get very little information on its 2000 status.
This is from INFORMATIONWEEK (May 4).
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In the power industry, nuclear plants have just begun taking inventory on the embedded systems that control operations, and are finding hundreds of them, many of them unique, and all highly dependent upon interfaces with other systems, says Barry Kallander, VP and general manager of business solutions at Litton Enterprise Solutions Inc., which has contracts with 12 plants to conduct inventory and year 2000 assessments of embedded systems, and is developing a central database for plants to share information. Fixing a plant's embedded systems could require an unscheduled shutdown, costing millions of dollars a day in lost revenue.
Utilities questioned by John Deere Credit have provided little detail about their year 2000 programs, saying only that they are "addressing the issue," says Ronald Frank, head of year 2000 assessments at the Madison, Wis., agricultural lender. As a result, Frank may not be able to start crafting contingency plans in July as he had hoped.
In general, most companies are not making much information about their year 2000 projects publicly available, according to an analysis of 1,000 Securities and Exchange Commission filings by Giga Information Group (see related charts on p. 215). Only 225 companies projected their total costs, which averaged $27 million per company. Among electric and telecom companies, 32% did not disclose anything about their year 2000 project status and 22% are running late.
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