No, the title for this month's column is not misspelled -- unfortunately. As soon as one dragon is slain -- in this case the Y2K bug -- it seems another pops up to take its place. I am referring to the sun, helios, old sol, the sine qua non for our planet's existence and, hence, our survival. From a realistic viewpoint, there may be less that we can do in the short term to fight this dragon, in that Mother Nature is involved and not just human enterprise and technology issues. In fact, as you read this column, the sun already may be hard at work, interrupting electricity flow somewhere in the world. This year marks the cyclical "high-point" for solar-magnetic storms. When the last zenith occurred in 1989, the entire province of Quebec, Canada, was in the dark for about 12 hours, thanks to the early effects of one such large solar-magnetic storm. Other areas of the planet suffered milder effects on their electrical T&D systems. This time around, things could get worse. We are putting far more demanding load conditions on the world's electricity grid than we did in 1989, and the end-user load is far more sensitive to voltage fluctuations. More importantly, we have not invested enough money in electric power-related spending for advanced research and development, or in infrastructure upgrades, according to a recent critical warning statement issued by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). It appears that our long-distance transmission grid, which is ever-more interconnected than in 1989, will be especially vulnerable to the solar-magnetic storms. Our vastly increased reliance on radio-based communications also may prove susceptible to solar-magnetic influences, resulting in occasional radio-signal interference. It still seems to me that we put the cart before the horse, with the way our nation went about deregulation; that is, we changed the playing conditions and the field design without changing the composition of the team components or members. Not only that, in the United States, we have created 51 different playing fields, and each of these variants rely on reconstituting the nature of the utility business from the same old team constructs that were right for the old playing conditions. In spite of all these dragons before us, as I wrote in 1998, understanding the nature and constitution of the professionalism among our electricity-industry members -- utilities and suppliers -- the industry would make it through the Y2K without serious disruption. Now that that particular dragon has been slain, more or less, new external challenges have come on to the scene. The big questions now include: Are we still up to facing these multiple threats? How can automation play a role here? Have we reduced the human content of our reformulated T&D utility business below the safety threshold required for reliable service and safe operations? Impressively, 150 participants contributed information to the EPRI report that suggests that prior electric-industry research has paid huge dividends. However, with the current shortfall in such research, there will be a few new gains realized in the new century. The report indicates that the current T&D grid in the United States is outdated and poses not just some concern but a "serious threat" to the U.S. economy. The report's premise is this: Deregulation is speeding up the obsolescence of today's T&D grid architecture and infrastructure, implying that the vastly increased number of electricity trades across interconnected lines is stretching the nation's grid beyond its design specifications. I would add that this applies equally across the majority of the world's electrified regions. Remember that T&D grids were designed and built for a regulated world, one in which power flow was quite stable, power transferred with adequate advance planning and not very frequently, and mostly flowing within a local or regional area, at that. Despite an awareness that EPRI's success also dictated in large part by the level of investment in research programs for the industry. I agree with EPRI's recent report conclusions. Over the last two decades, studies indicate that utilities are not willing to invest sufficient funds to develop advanced technology for T&D. Industry executives are often taking a narrow, sometimes self-serving and dangerously naïve view of a business that is crying for longer term infrastructure investments to assure continued electric power T&D reliability, integrity and security. Over the next 10 years, distributed generation will undoubtedly mature to the point that the situation may be alleviated, lowering the future requirement for the level of large-scale infrastructure spending that needs to be allocated at this time. However, 10 years is a long way out, and without substantive investment soon, we are not likely to bridge that coming decade-long gap without serious negative consequences.