Fewer outages vs US source? I work in the power industry in the US and I am sure this is regionally true but highly doubt it as a blanket statement.
Source: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303
In 2023, German households experienced an average of 13.7 minutes of power outages.
Source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Power-supply-13-7-minutes-of-po...
Not sure if the metrics are 100% comparable (they seem to be?) but points to a huge difference in reliability.
That has happened maybe twice over the last 16 years. In both cases the outages were a few minutes at best. I live in Berlin; power outages are extremely rare here.
That 13.7 minutes is not for all house holds. In the rare case an outage happen, the very limited amount of households affected by that would experience that duration on average. And lets face it if something knocks out a major power line, which does happen, that single incident might take a few hours to resolve and would probably drag that average way up. Which means that I expect the median outage duration is probably a lot lower than the average; in the order of seconds or minutes at best.
"The number of interruptions per customer in 2023 was 0.34, which means that each customer is only affected by a disruption once every three years on average."
That sounds more like it. I generally only adjust the time on my alarm clock when daylight saving requires me to; twice a year.
This gets much worse if you live in the countryside, for obvious reasons, and I would guess that the German average is mostly driven by countryside, not big cities.
The funny thing is, every time people from not-the-states talk about how rare power outages are, americans feel this bizarre urge to defend their power companies and grids, coming up with incredibly contortions to explain why it's not even remotely possible to do power the same in the states as elsewhere in the world. One memorable conversation here on HN ended up with the poster, facing the fact that yes, even in countries with lower population density still manage to bury their power cables (because they were claiming people were too far apart), somehow decided that it was because the states didn't have the expertise or equipment for burying power cables. Apparently no one here has diggers, and things like sewage pipes and gas pipes just run over the surface.
In the city, there is something like one outage per 4 years, usually due to an extreme thunderstorm or floods. And it usually lasts under 20 minutes.
Reliability of the grid is a major indicator of infrastructure quality and I am somewhat surprised by the fact that Americans tolerate so many outages and consider them somehow natural.
I suppose parts of the US have more exposure to those disasters than Germany btw.
But problem in recent years was the dead ash trees from emerald ash borer, they took a few years to fully die and weaken but now they just collapse into lines on a good wind gust.
Localities that have their own utilities never go down (Madison, NJ), my area is covered by Firstenergy that cheaps out and keeps only a skeleton crew in NJ, so when stuff like the poles snap at end of my driveway it takes 3-4 days to send crews from texas or ohio to replace it.
I had no idea your basic infrastructure was so bad.
Why not demand buried cables? Trees can't fall on them, drunk drivers can't knock them down.
On the other hand, here in Europe I've never had any problems remotely so common and severe, not in any place I lived, even with overhead power lines, including the tiny remote (by local standards) Welsh hamlet: https://maps.app.goo.gl/AtGFM9C5xJ6GrMJz5?g_st=com.google.ma...
Australia is of course ten times less dense than the US, comparable to Idaho, but we have a unique combination of moderately dense land in the east and south west plus shockingly sparse areas with little to no infrastructure at all.
If Alaska seceded, almost nobody in the other states would feel the difference, but the population density would jump 15%: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28population+USA+-+...
(Or in reverse if Trump acquires Greenland — with no real change to people's experiences, the population density would go down 23%: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28population+USA+%2...)
Likewise Australia, the outback is about 70%-85%-ish of the country depending who I ask, with about 607k people in it, so if the Aboriginal Australians were to secede with it, the rest suddenly gets x3-x6 the population density with no actual change to their experiences.
The questions that seem to matter, and for which population density is a proxy, are: how crowded does it feel, and how easy is it to get to the socioeconomic advantages of being near other people (infrastructure, commuting, shopping, community sports, faith buildings, pubs, etc.)?
Next you’ll tell me you don’t have snow days.
well, actually… :-)
PGE has to de-energize lines to prevent fires. Hurricanes just blow them down.
Let's not think that weather has nothing to do with any of this. That would just be beyond insulting
We’ve had a mild storm season the past two years and we’ve maybe been down seconds in total in my area.
While the average I’m sure is correct, the distribution is going to depend a lot on what is going on with nature. When I lived in California I lived in an LADWP area so I didn’t experience rolling blackouts. As a kid I had friends that would come over because they lived in an Edison area and play time in air conditioning at my house was much more enjoyable in August. If you were to find the average downtime during that period of time I expect it would saddle everyone with 10-15 minutes of outages even though my area never went down and my friends lost power for a few hours each week during heat waves.
That said, I also doubt that bomb resistance was the main reason for underground power lines. The sentiment in Germany at the time was, and mostly still is today: "No more wars!"
Presumably, you aim for the substations anyway, which I think are generally above ground no matter where the wires are ...