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How often/long does your power go out? Americans on this site always mention grid failures as a concern about electric heating/cars/whatever. While I won’t cl

by rgmerk 4y ago

How often/long does your power go out? Americans on this site always mention grid failures as a concern about electric heating/cars/whatever. While I won’t claim that power failures never happen where I live, because they do…but they’re very very rare and short enough not to care. The only exceptions are major natural disasters like hurricanes. Americans, why do you have such a terrible electricity distribution grid?

UncleEntity 4y ago
> The only exceptions are major natural disasters like hurricanes. Which is the same as with us Americans. My last apartment had a handful of power outages and all except one was due to weather. The exception was a transformer that exploded — which seems common as I’ve seen at least three just randomly go boom. When you get major weather events, where they are pulling in personnel from all over the nation, is when people get concerned about electric heating because it might take a while to get to them.
micro_cam 4y ago
It’s not bad where I am now in rural Montana but where I grew up near Seattle the power was off for a week plus most winters. Lots of above ground power lines in heavily forested suburban sprawl means lots of branches in lines every wind storm and they (private) electric co has to visually check all of them before they can turn power back on. Despite being much more rural the power coop that serves me now seems to never have an outage that lasts more then a few hours. Probally mostly because they have much less pine to check.
leashless 4y ago
Horrible weather. Very very spread out population. And huge spikes and troughs of infrastructure investment over decades.
zip1234 4y ago
The spread out housing means doing things like overhead power wires to save cost and reach further away places. Easily disrupted by fallen trees.
snuxoll 4y ago
Power outages aren’t an argument against heat pumps anyway. Without power my central fan can’t run and thus my forced air natural gas furnace is dead in the water. Anyway, where I live in Boise most utility outages are due to physical damage - whether that be animals, auto accidents, extreme weather (not “it got cold”, but wind gusts toppled a tree that brought down a utility pole), and fiber seeking backhoes. Even had the gas get shut off at my old house because an auto accident hit some equipment a street down causing a gas leak.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Would you even have gas for it to burn if there was no electricity to run its meter?
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Every gas meter I've ever had has been purely mechanical. Have you ever seen one that needed mains electricity to work, and that acted like a shutoff valve when it lost it?
    - irq 4y ago
      You’re right about the gas meter, but the town/city infrastructure necessary to pump gas through said meter does rely on electricity. They have backups, but for how long? Long enough to ride out most power outages, but nothing unexpectedly extended. Many rural houses have tanks on site because there are no public gas lines to connect to. My house has a 1000 gallon tank and is not vulnerable to the above, for example.
      - NickNameNick 4y ago
        Most reticulated gas networks use the pipe network itself as the storage facility. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage#Pipeline_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage#Pipeline_c... There may be more than a day of capacity just in the pipe network.
  - 4y ago
twothamendment 4y ago
I'm American, I think it isn't that bad, people are just like to whine and complain. America is also huge, so there is likely someone with a different experience and reason to complain. My well pump is electric and I haven't been out of power long enough to be concerned about getting water.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
We don’t. Power very very rarely fails, but when it has recently it’s been big infrastructures with flawed designs like the freezes in Texas, from what I’ve seen.
inamberclad 4y ago
It seems to depend on the area. In the SF Bay Area, wide scale power outages are rare. In Houston, most of my coworkers had small generators to keep their fridges and air conditioners running after a hurricane knocks out power.
- imoverclocked 4y ago
  Depends on where you are in the SF Bay Area. The hills in the region often have week long outages every year. I always know when the power goes out because the valley in front of my house hums with the sound of generators.
  - inamberclad 4y ago
    Wide scale are the operative words...
    - imoverclocked 4y ago
      I mean, 10s of thousands of people isn’t wide scale? Weeks of teams of PG&E workers trying to restore power isn’t wide scale? What is the threshold here?
      - imoverclocked 4y ago
        Case and point, view the pge outage map right now. https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outagecenter/ https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outagecenter/
- 8b16380d 4y ago
  Isn’t pg and e still doing those wind shutdowns?
qudat 4y ago
Like others mentioned, it depends on your region. I happen to live in a town surrounded by trees and the powerlines are above ground. It’s very common for branches to break and knock out power lines in the summer during windy storms. This usually means no power for 1-3 day stretches and only happens 1-3 times per year. So worst case it’s no power for 9 days total every year. The problem is it usually hits in the hottest days of the year so people really complain — myself included. WFH also makes matters more complicated.
MobiusHorizons 4y ago
Most of our distribution network is above ground, so areas with higher wind and older infrastructure are more prone to outages. When I used to live in Ukraine, power outages were rarely due to distribution infrastructure (which was underground in most of the city I lived in) and much more likely to be related to generating capacity. We would go through periods of rationing where there would be frequent outages that would last a few hours, but rarely long enough for food to go bad.
eisa01 4y ago
Does American utilities not pay any compensation for power outages? My local utility pays 50 EUR starting 12 hours after the start of an outage, and 4 EUR/hr after that. So a 2 day outage would pay out 200 EUR, and it all happens automatically. There's no exceptions to this (only if you are at fault...), and this gets subtracted from their regulated revenues such that it hits the bottom line. Naturally, most low voltage distribution lines are buried under ground
- mackatsol 4y ago
  Not in Canada.. and this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. Mind you here we have a much much larger country to cover in infrastructure , so it’s cheaper to run above ground.
  - hoorible 4y ago
    Worth mentioning that I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life and I don’t remember a utilities outage lasting as long as 1/2 a day, so not sure a payout after that length of time would make sense anyways. Our neighbourhood had an outage last winter during the -40 cold snap, and we were definitely at risk of water pipes freezing (gas fireplace was on, but without circulation it didn’t matter). The potential structural damage repair costs from outages up here would be insane, which makes me wonder if that’s part of why our grid seems so reliable (compared to other countries, anecdotally).
- NavinF 4y ago
  When we complain about power outages, we're usually talking about 1 hour outages that happen every few years, not 12 hour outages.
  - mtrower 4y ago
    Where I'm at (Madison, WI), it's more like multiple times per year. This is a capitol city. Recently, I stayed for three months on a mountain in Virginia. We lost power at least 6 times, usually for multiple hours. Once it was out half the day. There's a good reason the proprietor there keeps a backup generator on automatic failover.
midoridensha 4y ago
America doesn't have regular power outages; they're very infrequent and exceptional. However, when they do happen, they can be really big events, such as the big failure in the Northeast about a decade ago, and the infamous problem more recently in Texas during the winter. There's also local outages from natural disasters or extreme weather. Usually, very localized outages from storms (like falling trees) don't affect that many people and are repaired quickly. Outages from hurricanes, however, are bigger and take much longer to fix. What happened in Texas was just really bad planning and legislation, and only affected Texas.

by rgmerk 4y ago

UncleEntity 4y ago

> The only exceptions are major natural disasters like hurricanes. Which is the same as with us Americans. My last apartment had a handful of power outages and all except one was due to weather. The exception was a transformer that exploded — which seems common as I’ve seen at least three just randomly go boom. When you get major weather events, where they are pulling in personnel from all over the nation, is when people get concerned about electric heating because it might take a while to get to them.

micro_cam 4y ago

It’s not bad where I am now in rural Montana but where I grew up near Seattle the power was off for a week plus most winters. Lots of above ground power lines in heavily forested suburban sprawl means lots of branches in lines every wind storm and they (private) electric co has to visually check all of them before they can turn power back on. Despite being much more rural the power coop that serves me now seems to never have an outage that lasts more then a few hours. Probally mostly because they have much less pine to check.

leashless 4y ago

Horrible weather. Very very spread out population. And huge spikes and troughs of infrastructure investment over decades.

zip1234 4y ago

The spread out housing means doing things like overhead power wires to save cost and reach further away places. Easily disrupted by fallen trees.

snuxoll 4y ago

Power outages aren’t an argument against heat pumps anyway. Without power my central fan can’t run and thus my forced air natural gas furnace is dead in the water. Anyway, where I live in Boise most utility outages are due to physical damage - whether that be animals, auto accidents, extreme weather (not “it got cold”, but wind gusts toppled a tree that brought down a utility pole), and fiber seeking backhoes. Even had the gas get shut off at my old house because an auto accident hit some equipment a street down causing a gas leak.

OJFord 4y ago
Would you even have gas for it to burn if there was no electricity to run its meter?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Every gas meter I've ever had has been purely mechanical. Have you ever seen one that needed mains electricity to work, and that acted like a shutoff valve when it lost it?
  - irq 4y ago
    You’re right about the gas meter, but the town/city infrastructure necessary to pump gas through said meter does rely on electricity. They have backups, but for how long? Long enough to ride out most power outages, but nothing unexpectedly extended. Many rural houses have tanks on site because there are no public gas lines to connect to. My house has a 1000 gallon tank and is not vulnerable to the above, for example.
    - NickNameNick 4y ago
      Most reticulated gas networks use the pipe network itself as the storage facility. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage#Pipeline_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage#Pipeline_c... There may be more than a day of capacity just in the pipe network.
- 4y ago

twothamendment 4y ago

I'm American, I think it isn't that bad, people are just like to whine and complain. America is also huge, so there is likely someone with a different experience and reason to complain. My well pump is electric and I haven't been out of power long enough to be concerned about getting water.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

We don’t. Power very very rarely fails, but when it has recently it’s been big infrastructures with flawed designs like the freezes in Texas, from what I’ve seen.

inamberclad 4y ago

It seems to depend on the area. In the SF Bay Area, wide scale power outages are rare. In Houston, most of my coworkers had small generators to keep their fridges and air conditioners running after a hurricane knocks out power.

imoverclocked 4y ago
Depends on where you are in the SF Bay Area. The hills in the region often have week long outages every year. I always know when the power goes out because the valley in front of my house hums with the sound of generators.
- inamberclad 4y ago
  Wide scale are the operative words...
  - imoverclocked 4y ago
    I mean, 10s of thousands of people isn’t wide scale? Weeks of teams of PG&E workers trying to restore power isn’t wide scale? What is the threshold here?
    - imoverclocked 4y ago
      Case and point, view the pge outage map right now. https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outagecenter/ https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outagecenter/
8b16380d 4y ago
Isn’t pg and e still doing those wind shutdowns?

qudat 4y ago

Like others mentioned, it depends on your region. I happen to live in a town surrounded by trees and the powerlines are above ground. It’s very common for branches to break and knock out power lines in the summer during windy storms. This usually means no power for 1-3 day stretches and only happens 1-3 times per year. So worst case it’s no power for 9 days total every year. The problem is it usually hits in the hottest days of the year so people really complain — myself included. WFH also makes matters more complicated.

MobiusHorizons 4y ago

Most of our distribution network is above ground, so areas with higher wind and older infrastructure are more prone to outages. When I used to live in Ukraine, power outages were rarely due to distribution infrastructure (which was underground in most of the city I lived in) and much more likely to be related to generating capacity. We would go through periods of rationing where there would be frequent outages that would last a few hours, but rarely long enough for food to go bad.

eisa01 4y ago

Does American utilities not pay any compensation for power outages? My local utility pays 50 EUR starting 12 hours after the start of an outage, and 4 EUR/hr after that. So a 2 day outage would pay out 200 EUR, and it all happens automatically. There's no exceptions to this (only if you are at fault...), and this gets subtracted from their regulated revenues such that it hits the bottom line. Naturally, most low voltage distribution lines are buried under ground

mackatsol 4y ago
Not in Canada.. and this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. Mind you here we have a much much larger country to cover in infrastructure , so it’s cheaper to run above ground.
- hoorible 4y ago
  Worth mentioning that I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life and I don’t remember a utilities outage lasting as long as 1/2 a day, so not sure a payout after that length of time would make sense anyways. Our neighbourhood had an outage last winter during the -40 cold snap, and we were definitely at risk of water pipes freezing (gas fireplace was on, but without circulation it didn’t matter). The potential structural damage repair costs from outages up here would be insane, which makes me wonder if that’s part of why our grid seems so reliable (compared to other countries, anecdotally).
NavinF 4y ago
When we complain about power outages, we're usually talking about 1 hour outages that happen every few years, not 12 hour outages.
- mtrower 4y ago
  Where I'm at (Madison, WI), it's more like multiple times per year. This is a capitol city. Recently, I stayed for three months on a mountain in Virginia. We lost power at least 6 times, usually for multiple hours. Once it was out half the day. There's a good reason the proprietor there keeps a backup generator on automatic failover.

midoridensha 4y ago

America doesn't have regular power outages; they're very infrequent and exceptional. However, when they do happen, they can be really big events, such as the big failure in the Northeast about a decade ago, and the infamous problem more recently in Texas during the winter. There's also local outages from natural disasters or extreme weather. Usually, very localized outages from storms (like falling trees) don't affect that many people and are repaired quickly. Outages from hurricanes, however, are bigger and take much longer to fix. What happened in Texas was just really bad planning and legislation, and only affected Texas.