WASHINGTON -- Utilities must work harder and faster to ward off the virtually inevitable millennial blackouts and glitches, lawmakers warned the industry today.
"Quite honestly, I think we're no longer at the point of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions, but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions are going to be," said Senator Christopher Dodd.
The Connecticut Democrat is the vice chairman of a special Senate panel on potential Year 2000 computer and microchip meltdowns. The panel focused its first hearing on electric utilities because, Dodd said, "if we don't have power to generate electricity, everything else is moot."
With 567 days to the next century, senators said the prospects are slim of fixing the power grid's hundreds of millions of chips, microprocessors, computer programs, and other technologies that could be facing double-ought disaster.
Senator Robert Bennett, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, said a survey of 10 of the nation's largest electric, oil, and gas utilities showed that their preparations were lagging. He believes there is a 40 percent chance of a major regional blackout. "That's moving down from a 50 percent estimate," the Utah Republican said.
"I had anticipated that I would be able to provide a positive report on the Year 2000 status of these public utilities. Instead, based on the results of this survey, I am genuinely concerned about the very real prospects of power shortages as a consequence of the millennial date change," Bennett said.
Only two of the 10 utilities surveyed had finished an assessment of their automated systems, which is an early step in the preparation process, he said. "One firm did not even know how many lines of computer code it had," he said, and none had completed a contingency plan.
The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees much of the nation's power grid and natural-gas pipeline system, said the agency lacks authority to force utilities to make preparations or to report on their efforts.
"The state of Year 2000 readiness of the utility industry is largely unknown," the agency's chairman, James Hoecker, said. "Any failure to fully understand the seriousness of the issues must be regarded as a significant problem."
After the hearing, Bennett said Congress may need to move this summer on legislation to give the energy commission and other agencies more access to company information and to ease antitrust barriers to cooperation among companies on Year 2000 plans.
"If it turns out there are artificial barriers to the collection of information or cooperation among utilities, then I think we should move," he said. "But I don't think the government can order a company to become Year 2000 compliant, or try to punish them if they are not."
The head of North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry group formed in the late 1960s to try to ensure reliability of the nation's power grid, said there was an "extremely low, but conceivable" chance for a widespread system failure. The Clinton administration has asked NERC to oversee utilities' millennium bug protections, efforts that council president Michehl Gent said must be coordinated throughout the energy sector.
"An individual electric utility that invests tens of millions of dollars in solving Year 2000 problems could be affected in a major way by neighboring systems that have not been as diligent," Gent said, whose group is to submit a report to the Energy Department next July.
