The teams have completed the inventory process and found very few pieces of equipment will be affected. Charles Brown, manager of West Texas Utilities' Lake Fort Phantom Hill power plant, shows some of the monitors and controls used to generate electricity at the plant. WTU is in the testing phase of making sure its equipment and systems will work in the year 2000. We have only found nuisance problems. Employees are testing equipment by setting dates to see if it works properly.
Some computer components read such series of nines as error messages.
The two February dates verify systems will work in leap year conditions. In the transmission and distribution area there are 190,000 electric meters. Only 4,700 of them are solid state, and only 12 of those are not Y2K ready, said David Teeter, WTU's director of transmission and distribution operations. Anyway, they wouldn't interrupt service. Fewer than 15 percent of other controls in the system have microprocessors and the inventory and testing has found only a few of them have date-logic applications.