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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

I've seen the John Oliver videos and all, so I know this comes as a surprise to no-one but... the US needs to get its act together and build some actual infrastructure. I've heard lots of encouraging stories on the Volts podcast about it, too. Not enough, not fast enough, from what I understand.

I'm 38 and I've had power go out in my house for lots of reasons, but all of them came down to me blowing a fuse somehow. I can't remember ever having had an actual, you know, power outage. So I guess I just here to tell you over there in the US that another way is possible. :)

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Depends on the region. I live in one of the bad areas, with lots of trees. The power goes out every couple months for a couple hours.

But I was very surprised to learn that until 2021, most Texans had never had a power interruption in decades (which I suppose added to their panic).

Not all that useful to say "the US" here. California has it's wildfires and earthquakes. The west has extreme temperature swings. Southeast has hurricanes, and northeast has trees, ice, and wind. The entire south likes to run air conditioning. What does your country or its neighbors face? How about 10 countries over?

> But I was very surprised to learn that until 2021, most Texans had never had a power interruption in decades

And now in 2025 you will find the highest density of generac installs in Texas. I'm in a neighborhood where at least 80% of the homes have a standby unit. The substation is less than a mile away but the lines have to go through Narnia to reach us. Outages are half a day at a minimum.

> What does your country or its neighbors face? How about 10 countries over?

Well my country sometimes has storms that do lead to power cuts for a few hours in the worst case, it's happened to me in 1999 and 2010 (but then there was also flooding that time). It's not happened since except for a couple of scheduled cuts that lasted a minute or so.

About five countries over, there is a special military operation that you might have heard of. About ten countries over there's another one. I'm pretty sure some neighbouring countries also have ice, forests, wind and wildfires.

Do you have trees where you live? :) Because we have above-ground power lines in much of the US, wind and ice are always bringing branches down on power lines.

New local and/or urban last mile electrical distribution infra is typically buried, but to your point, lots of legacy above ground infra at risk until someone finds the funds to bury/harden it.

https://www.fema.gov/case-study/overhead-underground-it-pays...

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/21/burying-power-lines-for-wild...

https://research.ufl.edu/should-power-lines-go-underground.h...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220101210439/https://www.eei.o...

(have an electrical journeyman friend who will spend the rest of his life upgrading California electrical infra, we speak frequently on this topic)

I live in the 3rd "wealthiest" county in the United States. The combined market cap of headquartered companies here total over 10 trillion dollars. I can't install solar panels and I can't be bothered to buy house batteries so I've only had power 98.6% of the time last year.

I've lost hope. In theory it can be done but it feels something on the same order as setting foot on the moon again. We have the technology and capability to do so but somehow our population collective decision results in keep things garabge.

"Losing hope" after saying you "can't be bothered" to buy batteries feels very self-inflicted.

I live in the southern US. Our power goes out all the time due to hurricanes, tornados, flooding, falling tree limbs, and various other extreme weather events.

A lot of homes have gas or propane generators that will cut on when a power outage is detected.

Same here (Western Europe). I can't recall the last time we had a power outage that was not caused inside the house.

All power cables except for long-distance transport are underground though, which probably helps a lot and might account for the difference to a large extend.

(Our microwave oven did trip our residual-current circuit breaker a few weeks ago, never encountered that before, only 'fuse switch'-flips. Sadly that was the end of the device after 16 years.)

I'm as big a fan of ragging on "america" as anyone else, but it does occasionally have a few relatively unique problems compared to most other countries, such as the distances involved and the (lack of) density of population.

Above ground electric lines vs buried ones are a good example of how quickly your ROI can drop off for infrastructure problems.

Spending 10 million to add cold-weather protection to a powerplant that services 5million people? No brainer. Spending 10 million to bury 100 miles of power line that services 1000 people? Ehh...

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