SAN FRANCISCO -- A few confused clocks and repairs at three nuclear power plants, none of which produced outages, were the only problems seen so far on Friday as North America headed toward 1 January 2000, electric industry officials said.
"Three clocks timed to run on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) had a problem...but this had no effect on power supply or power operations," said Jerry Cauley, a spokesman for the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).
NERC is the Princeton, N.J.-based group that oversees operation of the power grid serving some 305 million people in the United States and Canada.
"There are GMT reference clocks throughout the (electrical) industry. About 30 percent of computers in control and telecoms systems in the U.S. and Canada are timed to GMT," Cauley said.
He declined to say where the faulty clocks were located, but added that the problem was quickly corrected by simply resetting them.
Midnight GMT was passed at 7 p.m. EST.
A spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) said separately that one of the clocks was used to coordinate generation and transmission systems at a Wisconsin facility, but he also declined to cite which company operated the facility. Industry officials said the plant was not a nuclear facility.
Earlier Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reported outages at three U.S. nuclear power plants, but said the outages were likely due to normal repairs and maintenance rather than Year 2000 computer problems.
Typically, several of the 103 nuclear power plants in the U.S. are shut for maintenance on any given day of the year.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, in a briefing to reporters in Washington Friday evening, said that so far there were no power outages in the United States that could be linked to Y2K bugs.
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.
