Heads up – effectively offline for now
lkml.iu.edu
lkml.iu.edu
Much of the power infrastructure here is above ground lines with significant tree coverage. There were over 3000 separate power outages , each that needs repair.
This is not an unexpected outcome, and it does favor the prepared. I have a 42kwh battery system plus 20kw of Solar as well as a generator so I have not been significantly affected. Comcast internet also went down , but I have a Starlink backup link.
If your power comes above ground and you live in a forest, you are going to lose power during a storm… and your house is not going to stay warm when it is 10 degrees F outside.
Hehe, I hope though his time estimate is not correct? Still baffled that certain power strategies and gas dependencies of certain other countries were not too long ago heavily discussed and criticized as the end, with people soon to be dying and freezing (just very theoretically, as this never manifested), largely by not involved US citizens, while these outages seem to be the norm and quite kind of accepted in the US nowadays? Wrong impression, likely very different?
I'm not excusing such power outages. But this does come from a specific material reality.
The reality of the power distribution network is a continuous threat from trees, of which there are a lot. Oregon has about 10 billion trees (compared to 3 billion in the UK).
As kardianos mentioned - The trees are tall and the power lines are in the fall zone - which is a recipe for problems in ice/winds storms that don't happen often. Just keeping the trees trimmed near the power lines themselves is a huge undertaking of continuous work.
The grid could be much more resilient - But not for $0.12/kwh.
I think if I moved back to the mainland, I'd still bring some of the preparations I do here like:
* Having a transfer switch for a generator that powers small parts of the house
* Solar panels -- They are too cheap not to. It at least gives you power for five or six hours a day even if you don't have batteries or a generator.
* Cistern for water. Having a few hundred gallons of water storage is a game changer when there is a power outage and the water can't get to your house.In my town most people have propane (or gas) generators to compensate.
Everybody definitely still has outages in the Romanian countryside now, my parents (who live in the countryside somewhere in South-Eastern Romania) did have one for two or three days when there was that freakish snow-storm around last November - beginning of December. Not to mention the constant light flickering, I'm wondering how come all the electrical appliances are still in one piece.
Later edit: I'm pretty sure Switzerland (and most of Western Europe, for that matter) very rarely have weather events like the one from these photos [1]
[1] https://www.dobrogeanews.ro/judetul-constanta-viscol-zapada-...
If you're in an environment that has strong enough winds to cause issues for power poles... you bury the fucking cables.
> Maybe the infrastructure in some places is better because those places were more concerned with the infrastructure in the first place
Probably, yes, but it is easier to make the infrastructure more user-friendly in order to be handled by not perfect administrations than to make those administrations as close to perfect as possible, because the latter case is only present/valid in only some select locations (for example see how NYC is not part of that club of select locations).
I'm in the Scottish highlands (only an hour from Glasgow) and when the winter storms come in, we can be out of power for some hours, there's been a couple of instances in the last year, so not common, but not unheard of either.
That's not a major surprise as the power company often has to fix lines in pretty stormy conditions in thinly populated areas.
Our solution to it has been having a battery which kicks in and can run the house for 12 hours or so.
I got so tired of multi hour power outages, I paid something like $20k to have a natural gas generator installed in March 2022. Since then it has run 16 times (based on a quick read of the monthly summary emails), of which maybe 5 were short term couple of minutes.
Even when I've lived in other parts of the US, I've experienced more, and longer, power outages than I ever experienced in the UK, in areas of comparable urban density.
But, you know, what's lots of inconvenience to customers when we could be making more profit for our shareholders, instead of burying our power lines!
Eastern seacoast areas in Canada and USA frequently lose power due to high winds - tropical storms or hurricanes making landfall. Similarly Winter blizzards.
Thunderstorm do sometimes hit power infrastructure as well.
North American grid is famously interconnected and fragile too. I am amazed at the crews that are rapidly dispatched for broken trees and downed wires and fix it pretty quickly. But if it's a big storm with many outages it'll take some time. In Nova Scotia for example it's not uncommon for some households to be without power for days.
And all bets are off if significant parts of grid are down and we struggle with startup sequences.
> I am amazed at the crews that are rapidly dispatched for broken trees and downed wires and fix it pretty quickly.
While power lines above the air are more susceptible to disturbances, they are also FAR easier to deal with.
Europeans laugh at our cheap 2x4 houses too, but being able to demolish a non-load-bearing wall in two hours and build a different one in a day or two means I can literally reconfigure my house when living situations change -- like the college kid needing a quiet room to study in, or closing off a new bedroom area for the sister-in-law needing to move in for a few months.
They are probably as easy to remove as your (wooden?) walls, but I don't know anyone who would do it for just a few months.
This reminds me of people putting water pipes outside the house to make them easier to thaw when they freeze, rather then inside the wall where they never freeze.
My city has areas with both buried and above-ground lines, and the above-ground areas see a week or two without power every year or so. Living in the buried-line areas, I haven’t seen an outage since ‘03. There’s one area of the city with buried lines that lost power a while back —- when an entire power plant went offline due to a bad storm. And again, they didn’t have to tear up the streets to fix that.
So now, in 2024,the power still flickers every time the wind blows and goes down at least an hour a year.
And yet, despite all the money pumped into the northern part of the grid, there is still only one connection to the national grid and it's right under the flight path of the airport where a plane already crashed into it once. Whole city, north and south, had no power for 12-ish hours.
We have east coast weather, lots of empty land between villages, dramatic temperature changes, inhospitable terrain, etc. – we have most of the reasons power companies usually have for defending that days-long outages are normal.
It's possible to build a resilient grid, but not if profit becomes the only incentive (see Texas' issues). Hydro-Québec is steadily profitable, but not maximized for profit, which is key for utilities.
Perhaps if we did less of the world's policing we could spend some of that money on infrastructure.
Now that I live in a big Brazilian city though, I can't remember the last time it happened. Even when the reserves were low during the pandemic, service did hold.
I think blizzards, ice storms, tornados, and hurricanes are more common in North America and it's pretty tough to secure infrastructure against those with 100% uptime.
The power is off for 2-9 hours every day, even in densely populated areas. Everyone who can afford it, has their own battery and inverter setup to keep lights, Internet, freezers and security systems running.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-04-06-frankfort...
In that instance or another owners of a solar farm even provided their excess power to the town free of charge.
Hurricanes, long-track tornadoes, and earthquakes are even worse.
It's not that technology is lacking, it's that the cost of making infrastructure resilient to very bad weather (worse than Australia sees) is too high. Most people who want to do something about it buy a generator, which solves most of their problem even though in aggregate it's terribly inefficient.
Besides, it will give you a better appreciation of human achivements once you don't take hot water for granted.
I expected Linus to be more scared by an internet outage than SUVs!
No. And definitely not ones that charge a laptop as those can cost 10x as much.