One-off incidents don't really mean anything in the big picture.
However, I do recall back when there were grid problems in Texas a few years ago someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability and solid regulatory framework (California pay 2x as much IIRC). I'm too far away to really get into the details but it'd be much more interesting to have a comparison on the reliability of the Californian grid compared to other US states and even countries. When it comes to high availability the diminishing returns to spending set in pretty quick and I get the impression there is a slow return to economic reality happening as voters are forcing governments to start paying attention to energy again, environmentalists or otherwise.
Hoping this mega-mess pushes the city's effort to buy its own grid past the finish line. PG&E has been fighting it tooth and nail.
Not that it will necessarily make for fewer blackouts, but a ~50% rate discount would be nice. That's what users in Santa Clara pay IIRC, and SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.
As a Camp Fire climate refugee and week+-long PG&E PSPSes running on generators, hello from hill country TX. While we have ERCOT that is only slightly better and Enron-style market pricing, energy production infrastructure has actually caught up so long as not too many gigadatacenters are built to automate spamming Youtube with fake cat videos.
What is the story on leveraging natural gas infrastructure in SF? In parts of Texas we've made the grid a non-issue with lots of standby natural gas generation. About 80% of the homes in my community have full backup. Wednesdays get pretty noisy at noon around here. All of the public utilities can go for days without grid power now. The winter storm was the last time anyone saw difficulties with gas infrastructure. I don't know of anyone who lost gas service, even during the event. In the TX hill country and in more rural areas, these things run on buried propane tanks and in most cases there is enough fuel on site to run continuously for weeks before a truck has to show up.
I think there is something to be said for a semi-reliable grid encouraging resilience over time. You can't have it too unreliable, but it seems like there is a sweet spot that encourages high quality contingencies to develop.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] threadHowever, I do recall back when there were grid problems in Texas a few years ago someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability and solid regulatory framework (California pay 2x as much IIRC). I'm too far away to really get into the details but it'd be much more interesting to have a comparison on the reliability of the Californian grid compared to other US states and even countries. When it comes to high availability the diminishing returns to spending set in pretty quick and I get the impression there is a slow return to economic reality happening as voters are forcing governments to start paying attention to energy again, environmentalists or otherwise.
Not that it will necessarily make for fewer blackouts, but a ~50% rate discount would be nice. That's what users in Santa Clara pay IIRC, and SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.
A concerning miss in proofreading or am I learning about a new fire-fighting technology today?
Ukraine bombs a power station in Russia, hundreds of thousands are left without electricity.
Peaceful winter weather, no major storm, hurricane, earthquake, heat, frost, catastrophic rainfall in SF. 130k people are left without electricity.
In the former two cases, the cause is that something terribly wrong is happening for years. In the latter case, likely, too.
I think there is something to be said for a semi-reliable grid encouraging resilience over time. You can't have it too unreliable, but it seems like there is a sweet spot that encourages high quality contingencies to develop.