How unreliable is your power grid? It's a lot easier having someone else manage the entire infrastructure. Unless you're in an area with common widespread natural disasters there's no reason to expect a 7 day outage ever.
We live on a ranch near San Francisco.
We have several 24 hour and 1 or 2 48 hour long outages every winter.
See, when your power goes out you are one of thousands affected and your utility will spend man hours and overtime, etc., to get it back on very quickly. When our power goes out we are one of five. Or one of ten. They'll get to us Monday. Monday afternoon, that is.
I forget what year it was (2017 ?) our area had a 7-ish day power outage ... related to fires and PG&E transmission shutoffs. In other recent years we have had multi-day outages for similar reasons.
We've always needed a generator because of how long it takes service crews to get to remote, rural, dead-end locations like ours - but in 2022 even people in town want them because of the administrative power shutoffs ...
That makes the US seem like a third world country. In my apartment in central Europe I experienced only one, few hours long, power outage in over 10 years (not counting the few times when electricity was temporarily cut off because of unpaid bills :)
On the one hand I do find it to be an example of civilizational inadequacy and I am critical of my state and local government as a result.
On the other hand, I have made a decision to live in a very, very rural place that has almost nothing at all in common with the very urban place you describe living in.
Are thunderstorms considered a natural disaster (sincerely asking)? I've lived in a few states, in a few rural areas and sometimes storms would knock power lines down for a handful of days. I don't remember any 7 day stretches, but 2-4 days was not uncommon. Even more in the winter when I was in a snowy area.
A derecho[0] hit in my area (eastern Iowa) in August of 2020. This is an urban & suburban area with fairly reliable power—even short outages are rare, and I can't think of any instances where power was out more than a few hours—but after that storm there were dozens of miles of high-voltage power lines in need of complete replacement, along with supporting structures in some cases, as well as issues with generators and substations. My own home was without power for at least four days and some of my friends didn't get their power back for almost two weeks.
I used my vehicle's 1kW alternator as a generator for the first two days to run a portable 12V refrigerator and to recharge devices & battery packs in combination with a 200W inverter. It used surprisingly little fuel, perhaps 1/3 gallon per hour at most, and it was quieter and had better-filtered exhaust than the portable generators some of my neighbors were using, though of course it wouldn't be able to handle higher-power appliances like residential refrigerators or A/C. After that I took an impromptu trip out of the affected area until the power was restored—we never actually reached a point where one couldn't find gasoline for vehicles or generators, but there were long lines are all the local gas stations and I didn't want to risk it when there was another choice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2020_Midwest_derecho
From the "January 1998 North American ice storm" Wikipedia article [1]:
The area south of Montreal [...] was nicknamed the triangle noir ("dark or black triangle") [...] for the total lack of electricity for weeks.
[...]
In Quebec alone, 150,000 people were without electricity as of January 28.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...
After the storm whipped through, I believe over 170K customers were without power.
That's not a time line I'd ever have considered possible in a major city in May.
Worst it's ever been, supposedly. Topped the 1998 ice storm and the tornado in 2018 for number of people in the dark.
With climate change, I believe a lot of formerly reliable power grids will become less so in the future. Investments in distributed power generation and local storage will likely lead to a higher quality of life outcome for more people.
Electrical distribution will have to get better to keep expected reliability. Or if you are cynical about the prospects of that actually occurring, you cover your own needs.
If you live in Puerto Rico, extremely unreliable [0, 1]
> It's a lot easier having someone else manage the entire infrastructure
Indeed it is, if they're competent [2, 3]
> Unless you're in an area with common widespread natural disasters there's no reason to expect a 7 day outage ever
Puerto Rico, along with the mid to southern east coast of the US, along with coasts on the Gulf of Mexico, are not strangers to powerful hurricanes. As climate change gets worse, the impacts of these phenomena may increase. After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September of 2017, it took *months* for power to be restored to most of the island [4]
[0] (Island-wide outage in 2016, before Hurricane Maria): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37436392
[1] (Island-wide outage in April of this year): https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/04/07/major-...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/businesses-puerto-rico-f...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/09/us/puerto-rico-power-outa...
[4] https://www.npr.org/2018/08/15/638739819/nearly-a-year-after...
PR (and parts of TX) at least have the excuse of hurricanes. Although TX failing because of the unexpected people turning on their ACs in the summer is a bit much.
I was in northern NJ when Superstorm Sandy hit, and that suburb had many houses with multi-week outages.