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But that is the stance for a lot of electrical utilities. Sometimes weather or a car wreck takes out power and since its too expensive to have spares everywhere

But that is the stance for a lot of electrical utilities. Sometimes weather or a car wreck takes out power and since its too expensive to have spares everywhere, sometimes you have to wait a few hours for a spare to be brought in

yuliyp 1y ago
No, that's not the stance for electrical utilities (at least in most developed countries, including the US): the vast majority of weather events cause localized outages (the grid as a whole has redundancies built in; distribution to (residential and some industrial) does not. It expects failures of some power plants, transmission lines, etc. and can adapt with reserve power, or, in very rare cases by partial degradation (i.e. rolling blackouts). It doesn't go down fully.
- JoyfulTurkey 1y ago
  Spain and Portugal had a massive power outage this spring, no?
  - formerly_proven 1y ago
    Yeah, and it has a 30 page Wikipedia article with 161 sources (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...). Does that seem like a common occurrence?
crote 1y ago
> Sometimes weather or a car wreck takes out power Not really? Most of the infrastructure is quite resilient and the rare outage is usually limited to a street or two, with restoration time mainly determined by the time it takes the electricians to reach the incident site. For any given address that's maybe a few hours per decade - with the most likely cause being planned maintenance. That's not a "spares are too expensive" issue, that's a "giving every home two fully independent power feeds is silly" issue. Anything on a metro-sized level is pretty much unheard of, and will be treated as serious as a plane crash. They can essentially only be caused by systemic failure on multiple levels, as the grid is configured to survive multiple independent failures at the same time. Comparing that to the AWS world: individual servers going down is inevitable and shouldn't come as a surprise. Everyone has redundancies, and an engineer accidentally yanking the power cables of an entire rack shouldn't even be noticeable to any customers. But an entire service going down across an entire availability zone? That should be virtually impossible, and having it happen regularly is a bit of a red flag.
- roywiggins 1y ago
  I think this is right, but depending on where you live, local weather-related outages can still not-infrequently look like entire towns going dark for a couple days, not streets for hours. (Of course that's still not the same as a big boy grid failure (Texas ice storm-sized) which are the things that utilities are meant to actively prevent ever happening.)

yuliyp 1y ago

No, that's not the stance for electrical utilities (at least in most developed countries, including the US): the vast majority of weather events cause localized outages (the grid as a whole has redundancies built in; distribution to (residential and some industrial) does not. It expects failures of some power plants, transmission lines, etc. and can adapt with reserve power, or, in very rare cases by partial degradation (i.e. rolling blackouts). It doesn't go down fully.

JoyfulTurkey 1y ago
Spain and Portugal had a massive power outage this spring, no?
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  Yeah, and it has a 30 page Wikipedia article with 161 sources (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...). Does that seem like a common occurrence?

crote 1y ago

> Sometimes weather or a car wreck takes out power Not really? Most of the infrastructure is quite resilient and the rare outage is usually limited to a street or two, with restoration time mainly determined by the time it takes the electricians to reach the incident site. For any given address that's maybe a few hours per decade - with the most likely cause being planned maintenance. That's not a "spares are too expensive" issue, that's a "giving every home two fully independent power feeds is silly" issue. Anything on a metro-sized level is pretty much unheard of, and will be treated as serious as a plane crash. They can essentially only be caused by systemic failure on multiple levels, as the grid is configured to survive multiple independent failures at the same time. Comparing that to the AWS world: individual servers going down is inevitable and shouldn't come as a surprise. Everyone has redundancies, and an engineer accidentally yanking the power cables of an entire rack shouldn't even be noticeable to any customers. But an entire service going down across an entire availability zone? That should be virtually impossible, and having it happen regularly is a bit of a red flag.

roywiggins 1y ago
I think this is right, but depending on where you live, local weather-related outages can still not-infrequently look like entire towns going dark for a couple days, not streets for hours. (Of course that's still not the same as a big boy grid failure (Texas ice storm-sized) which are the things that utilities are meant to actively prevent ever happening.)