Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

How many hurricanes did Germany have in 2023? How many tornadoes did Germany have in 2023?

Let's not think that weather has nothing to do with any of this. That would just be beyond insulting

If I read the provided source correctly, if you exclude those events the average US customer still has two hours of power outages per year. That's a lot better than five, but still nearly an order of magnitude worse than 13 minutes.

Underground powerlines are the norm in Germany, hurricanes, tornadoes or not and their grid would still perform vastly better.

Atlanta, GA has underground power transmission through much of the city (and specifically my neighborhood within the city) and we can still lose power in storms. What isn’t underground currently is being moved there in much of the city. However, the transmission equipment is still outside and still has physical limits. There’s only so much water, so much wind, and so much lightning electrical systems can take without someone going dark. Underground trunks can also flood and short so they’re not a full panacea in areas that have heavy storms.

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.

I wish that was the case. Coincidentally, I live in Atlanta, also within the city (ITP, close to Piedmont Park) and all my neighborhood has above ground power transmission. Coming from Europe, it's infuriating. Not a year passes that we don't get two or three blackouts and a fair decent number of brownouts. That includes the past two years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com