Risk of rollover hiccups low say power chiefs

By CHRIS BARTON

New Zealand's electricity sector has spent about $100 million preparing for Year 2000 and found less than 3 per cent of its equipment and machinery had millennium bugs.

"The low incidence of disruptive problems is similar to what the industry found in the United States, Canada and Australia," said Robert Scott, chairman of the Electricity Industry Y2K Focus Group.

The finding, combined with the group's own survey of organisations in the electricity sector, provides compelling evidence that the lights should stay on for the country's millennium celebrations.

The survey showed 93 per cent of computer systems and 88 per cent of equipment with embedded chips necessary for the supply of electricity were Y2K-ready in September.

Mr Scott, who also heads Transpower's $8.2 million Project Millennium, said the sort of Y2K problems encountered - such as data loggers incorrectly sorting dates or information displaying on-screen with the wrong date format - were mostly of a nuisance nature. But there were some potentially more serious - such as air conditioning units used for cooling substation equipment that refused to deal with February 29 of the coming leap year.

The lack of Y2K problems in the sector can also be attributed to most of the equipment used for electricity supply and generation being electro-mechanical - such as supply meters in homes - predating the digital electronics of the computer age.

Mr Scott also said electrical engineers tended to be more disciplined than computer programmers.

"Because they have less code to play with, they tend to keep functionality to the core design, rather than use the date field unnecessarily."

He said that was one reason why embedded chips involved with the control of machinery had turned out to be such a minor problem.

So, if there was little replacement of equipment, on what did the national grid company Transpower, the five major generators, the 30 or so local delivery networks and the six major retailers spend $100 million?

Most of the money, said Mr Scott, went on the complicated process of finding and Y2K testing the individual embedded chips in equipment spread across the country and then testing how the whole network would perform during the rollover. Because of the critical nature of the electricity infrastructure, much of the testing had to be carried out using costly simulation platforms that replicated critical parts of the network.

As confidence grew, line and generating companies began to test isolated parts of their networks live.

United Networks' Y2K manager, Alison Waugh, was one of the first to take the bold step back in September of last year. Technicians successfully rolled forward the date on the computer control system that watched over many United substations. Supply continued as normal. Ms Waugh said even if the supervisory and data control system (Scada) had failed, staff were also at the ready to manually turn switches at the substations for the distribution of electricity - again thanks to the electro-mechanical nature of the gear. But getting to that point of confidence has cost about $3.5 million, not including the salaries of 15 staff, and more than two years of hard work. It also involved a Scada upgrade across the former Power New Zealand's network which, with the acquisition of TransAlta and Trust Power's line business, now services 500,000 North Island customers.

Besides Scada, the only other problem encountered was two applications in the company's billing system not talking to one another, a problem Ms Waugh said was relatively easy to fix.

In October this year Genesis, one of the three companies created earlier this year by the split-up of ECNZ, took a deep breath and rolled forward the date on equipment controlling a generating unit at the Huntly power station while the generator was online. Again, everything continued functioning as though nothing had happened.

Genesis Y2K project manager Brian Fair said the test gave the company huge confidence and allayed fears about Y2K - especially because Huntly's dual gas and oil fired turbines were more complex than hydro generating units. Mr Fair said the Genesis Y2K project, which took over from the one begun by ECNZ , has cost about $500,000. He echoed Mr Scott's findings of a small percentage of Y2K faults - "nuisance factors that the public wouldn't have noticed."

The other major expense has involved the improvement of contingency plans across the entire sector. Vector, the lines company split from the former Mercury Energy - and still mindful of the Auckland power crisis of early 1998, has put contingency preparations at the top of its list.

"Every day we realise things can go wrong," said Vector communications manager Mathew Bolland. After completing the testing phase of its "several million dollar" Y2K programme in June, Vector had focused on allocation of staff on the night to be rapidly dispatched to substations to manually take over switching operations should the Scada systems fail.

Mr Bolland said Vector was cautiously confident, but warned that outages could still occur not because of Y2K bugs but because "people still hit our power poles and lines still go down" - especially on New Year's eve.

Transpower's Robert Scott said while the industry as a whole had spent a large amount of money to find relatively little needed fixing, the critical nature of electricity supply to the economy meant there was no choice. There have also been spinoff benefits: updated contingency plans and procedures to deal with a range of emergencies, and improvements in communications and control mechanisms - not to mention a complete equipment inventory of the entire network.

"The rehearsals are over. It's now up to the cast and crews on the night. There's always the unknown, but its been an exhaustive preparation programme. The likelihood of failure of the entire system is minuscule."