In a power outage scenario, you're gonna be saving your mobile battery for more necessary requirements. The geeks can wait a few days for their new kernel version.
In terms of complete house power - Batteries are fantastic for a small size use case, but economically difficult in large size. I have 42kwh of battery storage (Enphase), plus 20kw of Solar generation, but that combined is not enough to cover a complete power outage longer than 24-36 hours in stormy weather. The cost of that system is well more than 10 times the cost to get a generator that can do the entire house (22kw Generac for example).
Beyond just the charging (lol), whatever happened to allowing inclement weather to slow life down for a few days? Snow days are the universe forcing you to take a break.
> typically able to resolve this kind of issue within ~10 days time
We seem to have a different opinion on what constitutes a "brief" power outage. I live in a third-world country, and 24 hours is already a long power outage.
I cannot imagine losing power for an hour, let alone a week. I grew up in rural Australia and it's completely unfathomable to me that anywhere in the first world could go without power for so long.
I grew up behind the iron curtain and power outages were a given, twice a day. Freezing temperatures in the apartments as well. But that was the Romanian communism and 50 years ago, not the USA today. Today I'm in rural Switzerland and never experienced outages, so I wouldn't accept arguments like "oh but everybody has outages on the countryside".
> "oh but everybody has outages on the countryside".
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]
I honestly don't know if we can compare - is it a matter of extreme events, or being prepared for extreme events? You know there's that running joke in Romania about authorities being surprised that it snows in winter, although I agree the article shows something quite extreme. So, how "rarely" is "rarely", and is it worth preparing for it?
I agree, but on the other hand Switzerland is on another level when it comes to infrastructure compared to almost any other European country, is not even fair (I've not been to Netherlands nor to the Nordic countries, maybe they come close to that).
I didn't read the comment as "and this never happens anywhere", but "and when this happens, it's due to shit infrastructure, and you can and should demand better".
If you're in an environment that has strong enough winds to cause issues for power poles... you bury the fucking cables.
And then it becomes very tedious to service them. Or some guy digs a hole in front of his house and suddenly half of the county is without power, with that guy in intensive care. To say nothing of the fact than in 20 or 30 years' time everyone will have forgotten which cables are buried where, because that happens all the time, almost everywhere.
Here they are buried and even I have the map of the cables going in front of my house - and no I'm not from the power company. If it doesn't work in one place doesn't mean it cannot work. Maybe the infrastructure in some places is better because those places were more concerned with the infrastructure in the first place? Because nowhere on earth did those underground cables just pop into existence...
As far as I know they have constant problems in places like NYC with just that, i.e. with underground stuff that no-one knows anything about anymore.
> 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 live in rural Australia and about a decade ago we lost power for 5 days after a cyclone swept through. Some parts of the grid are pretty vulnerable. I have solar and a battery now. :-)
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'll say though, I grew up in rural West Wales, and I don't think we ever had a power cut lasting longer than an hour or two, and even that only happened a few times a decade. It's not an area known for nasty weather though.
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!
I can't remember the last time I had a power outage, it must have been many years now. And even the few power outages I can vaguely remember were very short, so electronics restarted but you weren't without power for long enough to cause any issues. This is in Germany, and I suspect the fact that all regular power lines are buried helps a lot with reliability here.
Majority of power lines in many countries are above ground in the air.
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.
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.
Easier to fix is a lot more important when things are breaking all the time.
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.
But when they’re buried they require access FAR less frequently. In cities with buried power lines, power loss pretty much only occurs when the entire grid is undersupplied or goes down entirely like in the 2003 blackout. And those situations don’t require access to the buried lines.
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.
Palo Alto is like this. Northern, wealthier, part of the city got all the power lines put underground and then the money for the program "ran out" before they could get around to doing it for the southern, slightly less affluent, areas. Never mind that the whole city paid in to the program. Oh well that just how it goes.
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.
Québécois here – we have nationalized our power company (it's actually province-scale), and by our current standards, residents having hours of outage is an emergency, and several days is newsworthy every time.
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.
Nationalizing our power grid management would not solve these problems. Keep in mind the US power grid is more than 10 times the size of all of Canada in terms of production, and of course far far larger than in terms of distribution endpoints. The investment needed to do things like bury power lines would be hundreds of billions of dollar. The dollars could be spent without nationalizing the grid, but the problem is the money will not get spent. If we did nationalize, it would add another level of government spending and waste that would still not have the funds needed to actual fix anything.
Perhaps if we did less of the world's policing we could spend some of that money on infrastructure.
Growing up in the rural zone of Brazil, power outages were a constant issue, which thought me to always keep multiple backups of my data.
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.
Rural Australia has its own extremes, but does it get much severe weather?
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.
Here in South Africa we have had rolling blackouts every day for the last 18 years. Of course it has been rebranded as "loadshedding" by the government.
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.
Yes, but the corrupt people running that shitshow try to prevent anyone from doing such things because it makes them look bad and might cut into the profits they're extracting from the lifeless body of South Africa's infrastructure.
A lot of people have trees growing over, or very close to, power lines; during storms, high winds or ice accumulation cause many branches to break. Around here, utility crews periodically prune trees back from the wires, but a significant storm will still see hundreds of thousands without power. After a day or two they get it down to tens of thousands; fixing all of those can take many days. One downed power line can be repaired in an hour, but 1000s take a while. Some of the tail-end of repairs are more complicated, too.
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.
> Of course, this is Oregon, so "storm" here is what some people
would probably consider "somewhat windy", and "winter" here means that
the temperature is approaching -10°C.
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?
This is a regional thing, not a "US" thing. There are lots of Dug fir trees (60-120 ft tall, often with shallow root systems. Also many power lines are above ground elevated lines, but shorter then the trees. Most power generation comes from hydroelectric, so plenty of power generation, but in the US Pacific NW, it doesn't freeze too often. Most of the time it is just wet and rainy all winter long. So two things: 1. people are willing to attribute power loss to storms 2. Trees are not generally used to such cold weather, so they will break and snap in this weather.
I'm not excusing such power outages. But this does come from a specific material reality.
Exactly. It is important to remember that the rural somewhat-backwater state that both Linus and I live in, Oregon, is slightly larger than United Kingdom. Population of about 4.3 million (compared to 67 million in the same area in the UK).
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 live in Portland and power to my house has been out since Saturday at 7am. As of Monday morning there were still >50k households without power.
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.
I've been living in Puerto Rico for 5 years now where power outages are so common (monthly at a minimum) that I decided to go fully off grid and its been an eye opening experience.
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.
82 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadNo. And definitely not ones that charge a laptop as those can cost 10x as much.
> typically able to resolve this kind of issue within ~10 days time
We seem to have a different opinion on what constitutes a "brief" power outage. I live in a third-world country, and 24 hours is already a long power outage.
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Canada_ice_storm
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis
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!
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.
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.
I think if I moved back to the mainland, I'd still bring some of the preparations I do here like: