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Grid stability is essentially a different thing than local power availability. You lose your power if a tree falls on your power line, or if your local transfor

Grid stability is essentially a different thing than local power availability. You lose your power if a tree falls on your power line, or if your local transformer fails. Sad for you, but completely unrelated to grid stability. Grid instability happens when load and supply are no longer matched. That's when serious things have to happen - load shedding and rolling blackouts. In the developed world we put a lot of money into avoiding this - pumped hydro, battery storage, fast response gas turbines, frequency control programs running with big industrial users, and (opt-in) load shedding of big industrial users. All so that power is available to an end user who needs it.

zbrozek 4y ago
As someone living under PG&E, I'd love improvements to both. In the late summer we often lose power due to under-supply, in fall due to concern for fire, and in winter due to wind. In one recent month I was out of power for eight days in three tranches.
- Kalium 4y ago
  PG&E is an excellent example of grid failure through regulatory failure. California has made a mess of electrical regulation over the decades, and today you have to suffer through the result.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    I split my blame with roughly 2/3 going to CPUC and the rest going to PG&E.
fwlr 4y ago
Yeah, like I said it’s really hard to find representative data on grid stability. Local power outages will definitely overestimate grid instability by a lot, but it’s not entirely unrelated, it should capture ~most of grid stability issues (it is a gross over-estimate because maybe like 1%-5% of the total local power outage experienced is due to grid instability). So maybe the electrical grid is more like 5 or 6 nines.