PPL Corp. confirmed this morning that its 3.5 million delivery customers experienced no electricity service interruptions in central and eastern Pennsylvania, Montana, Latin America and the United Kingdom as a result of the Y2K changeovers related to the leap year phenomenon.

Traditionally, computers have had leap year trouble registering Feb. 29, often treating it as March 1 or treating March 1 as "Feb. 30." Due to certain mathematical quirks peculiar to the leap year 2000, there were greater risks this year for computer programming errors than in leap years past.

"At PPL we devoted more than 140,000 hours of preparation for Y2K over almost four years," said Bill Whitehead, PPL's manager of transmission and distribution operations. "We were well prepared for the New Year's Eve Y2K changeover, and we anticipated the leap year phenomenon at that time. We really weren't expecting any problems the past two nights. We had our normal after-hours personnel along with some extra help just at our main Transmission and Control Center outside of Allentown. We were also in touch with the regional electricity interconnection."

The leap year changeovers occurred without incident at any of the PPL companies. PPL's electricity distribution companies in the United Kingdom, Chile and Bolivia all reported no outages related to the leap year changeovers. In addition, PPL's natural gas delivery business, PPL Gas Utilities, also successfully made the transition without any leap year problems.