Cover-up of laggards continues

WASHINGTON, D.C. — “If New Year’s Day 2000 was tomorrow, we believe
the lights would remain on in North America,” said Michehl R. Gent,
president of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC),
yesterday at the National Press Club.

NERC is the trade group responsible for getting the electric
utilities ready for Y2K, and Gent presented the council’s final report
to U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson at the press conference.

Actually, the report is not truly NERC’s “final” account, as it was
billed. It seems there still is some work to do; so at least one
“follow-up progress report” will be presented to Secretary Richardson at
some unspecified future date.

The electric industry officials were beaming like first-time fathers
as they rolled out the statistics they say indicate that U.S. and
Canadian electric utilities are “more than 99%” ready for Y2K. Indeed,
it is doubtful that utilities anywhere else on the planet are better
prepared — or provide as much public disclosure, in such excruciating
detail.

Still, being first in class doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to
pass the real test without problems, and NERC invites some measure of
public nervousness by its refusal to identify the laggards among the
hundreds of utilities. After all, it’s of limited comfort to know that
99 percent of all the utilities are going to work — if you’re being
served by one of the other 1 percent. NERC’s message to the public
seems to be, “You have to get that information from your local
utility, and you have to interpret it — we’re not going to do
that for you.”

In his talk, Secretary Richardson did say that the Department of
Energy will release the names of the laggard utilities that are not
ready. But he left immediately after his speech, and when asked,
“when — on what date — will the names be made public,” nobody
from the Department of Energy was present and the utility spokesmen were
not about to fondle that hot potato.

“The NERC process has not disclosed names,” said the group’s Y2K
program coordinator. “We will work with the Department of Energy to
provide information on who’s not ready, but ultimately it will be their
decision when to make that public.”

Another reporter asked what measures NERC might take to get the
laggards ready.

“Peer pressure,” came the response.

“Is there anything beyond peer pressure?” the reporter asked.

“I’d say no,” the NERC spokesman answered. “I don’t think we need
anything beyond that.”

Apparently public pressure — customer pressure — is
not an option NERC wants to consider. Peer pressure — just us guys
around the poker table — will be enough.

Weighted down with statistics, there are numerous places in the NERC
report where questions are raised rather than answered.

To begin with, there is mention of “the more than 200 bulk electric
systems of North America,” “the 268 entities reporting monthly to NERC,”
and “the approximately 2,900 distribution systems in North America,”
plus Appendix B, “List of [251] Organizations Y2K Ready or Y2K Ready
with Limited Exceptions.” Yet nowhere is the overlap between these
lists made clear.

Then you have the three different kinds of electric utilities —
investor-owned companies, public power companies, and cooperatives. And
there’s no attempt to relate these distinctions to the lists mentioned
above.

According to NERC, in another example of confusion, “3.2% of
distribution systems (based on MW load served) are not Y2K Ready and
another 0.5% did not provide reports in the most recent quarter. Of the
public power distribution systems, 8% reported not yet being Y2K Ready
and another 2.5% did not participate in the surveys in the second
quarter. In the cooperative area, 13% of systems are not yet Y2K Ready
and another 1% did not respond in the second quarter.”

So, how many investor-owned utilities are not Y2K Ready? There are
figures for the other two types of utilities, but not that one. Upon
first glance, it appears the 3.2 percent figure referred to
investor-owned utilities, but no, it’s not identified that way, and
instead NERC seems to be saying that systems representing 3.2
percent of total megawattage in the U.S. are not ready. In which case
the report is mixing categories in one paragraph — starting with
references to size, then shifting to structural types, but
not including one of the three structural types.

A skeptic might say that this confusion could be intentional, so we
give up trying to interpret the whole thing and instead concentrate on
that sound bite: “99 percent ready.”

There are other caveats: On page 10 there is a table about the 17
“entities that have yet to complete the Remediation and Testing phase.”
Presumably these 17 “entities” represent the difference between “the 268
entities reporting monthly to NERC” (page iv) and the “list of 251
organizations” in Appendix B that are Y2K ready (268 – 251 = 17).

But wait! It turns out that 64 of those 251 “organizations” or
“entities,” whatever, really are not Y2K ready. Rather, they are “Y2K
Ready With Limited Exceptions.” That’s a handy category created by NERC
for good-guys-who-are-a-bit-slow. NERC says they are mostly
ready, that there are good excuses for their systems that aren’t ready
yet, and asserts that those systems will be ready very soon. The
only really bad guys are those elusive 17, and we’re not telling you who
they are.

Bottom line: 81 of the 268 entities reporting to NERC (64 + 17) were
not Y2K ready at the end of the second quarter of 1999. That’s 30
percent of the total. For some reason, though, NERC decided against a
headline saying “70 percent of utilities reporting to us are Y2K
ready.” Instead we are told that “More than 99 percent of all the
critical elements of the U.S. and Canadian electricity supply systems
are ready for Y2K.”