3 ms·

You have no idea how hard it is to resist posting a snarky comment here. For the love of McCarthy's parentheses, there's at least an order of magnitude of diffe

by weland 12y ago

You have no idea how hard it is to resist posting a snarky comment here. For the love of McCarthy's parentheses, there's at least an order of magnitude of difference in terms of duration between the two!

ghshephard 12y ago
Turns out there is a lot of variability in California, depending on the provider - here are some hard SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration) numbers. California ranges from 60 minutes of outages (SDGE) to 931 minutes of outages (Pacificorp) http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/energy/ElectricSR/Reliability/annualreports/saidi_1998to2008.htm http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/energy/ElectricSR/Reliability/ann... In this slide, http://desismartgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Towards-Indian-Smart-Grids-.pdf http://desismartgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Towards-..., for North delhi power limited (NDPL), they improved their SAIDI from 56 to 47 minutes. So, (very ironically) - you are correct - it's not unreasonable to say that there are parts of California that are one order of magnitude worse than areas of India. I realize that's not the point you were trying to make, but I always find it interesting to chase the data and see what it has to say. From a bigger picture, though - California really does have notoriously bad power quality in terms of outages, not even including the rolling blackouts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis) we had back in 2000/2001 (and justified me being allowed to purchase about $500K worth of generators, Diesel Belly tanks, and UPS systems for our server room) On my walk to work, at least once a month in the morning, I hear all of the buildings in Redwood City firing up their generators to do their monthly tests - nobody "relies" on PG&E Power for critical services, they plan for the outages. Just as a comparison - I'm in Singapore right now, and their SAIDI is .53 minutes/year. I've yet to see a generator being tested outside of Critical Facilities like data centers/emergency facilities.
- arjie 12y ago
  Tamil Nadu. Look at Tamil Nadu, one of the most prosperous states. Many areas there have outages longer than they have power. Chennai has shorter scheduled outages but because of the immense shortage of generation, this results in the rest of the state suffering. New Delhi is the capital. The north has less of a shortage, but capitals (like Chennai) are usually more insulated from blackouts anyway so looking at them alone will give you a poor idea. Also, do your figures include planned outages? Many places in TN, India have daily planned outages called load shedding.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- weland 12y ago
  > it's not unreasonable to say that there are parts of California that are one order of magnitude worse than areas of India. OP was talking about Rwanda, not India. 60 minutes per year, as disastrous as it sounds for California, is hardly comparable with the outages of several hours per week they have there. I get it, I get it, California life is hard, but seriously...
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Pacific Corp serves relatively rural northern California (most of their customers are in adjoining states). Infrastructure cost per customer is high there (and a sparse layout creates situations where redundancy doesn't make a lot of sense). Your Indian company is a quasi-government entity (or government influenced entity, I didn't dig into it very far) intended to improve quality of service in the the capital city of the country. Wikipedia says the SAIDI for the U.S. is ~1.5 hours, so NDPL should anyway survive comparison to some more relevant U.S. providers (but I speculate that you have not found an average provider for India).

by weland 12y ago

ghshephard 12y ago

Turns out there is a lot of variability in California, depending on the provider - here are some hard SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration) numbers. California ranges from 60 minutes of outages (SDGE) to 931 minutes of outages (Pacificorp) http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/energy/ElectricSR/Reliability/annualreports/saidi_1998to2008.htm http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/energy/ElectricSR/Reliability/ann... In this slide, http://desismartgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Towards-Indian-Smart-Grids-.pdf http://desismartgrid.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Towards-..., for North delhi power limited (NDPL), they improved their SAIDI from 56 to 47 minutes. So, (very ironically) - you are correct - it's not unreasonable to say that there are parts of California that are one order of magnitude worse than areas of India. I realize that's not the point you were trying to make, but I always find it interesting to chase the data and see what it has to say. From a bigger picture, though - California really does have notoriously bad power quality in terms of outages, not even including the rolling blackouts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis) we had back in 2000/2001 (and justified me being allowed to purchase about $500K worth of generators, Diesel Belly tanks, and UPS systems for our server room) On my walk to work, at least once a month in the morning, I hear all of the buildings in Redwood City firing up their generators to do their monthly tests - nobody "relies" on PG&E Power for critical services, they plan for the outages. Just as a comparison - I'm in Singapore right now, and their SAIDI is .53 minutes/year. I've yet to see a generator being tested outside of Critical Facilities like data centers/emergency facilities.

arjie 12y ago
Tamil Nadu. Look at Tamil Nadu, one of the most prosperous states. Many areas there have outages longer than they have power. Chennai has shorter scheduled outages but because of the immense shortage of generation, this results in the rest of the state suffering. New Delhi is the capital. The north has less of a shortage, but capitals (like Chennai) are usually more insulated from blackouts anyway so looking at them alone will give you a poor idea. Also, do your figures include planned outages? Many places in TN, India have daily planned outages called load shedding.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
weland 12y ago
> it's not unreasonable to say that there are parts of California that are one order of magnitude worse than areas of India. OP was talking about Rwanda, not India. 60 minutes per year, as disastrous as it sounds for California, is hardly comparable with the outages of several hours per week they have there. I get it, I get it, California life is hard, but seriously...
maxerickson 12y ago
Pacific Corp serves relatively rural northern California (most of their customers are in adjoining states). Infrastructure cost per customer is high there (and a sparse layout creates situations where redundancy doesn't make a lot of sense). Your Indian company is a quasi-government entity (or government influenced entity, I didn't dig into it very far) intended to improve quality of service in the the capital city of the country. Wikipedia says the SAIDI for the U.S. is ~1.5 hours, so NDPL should anyway survive comparison to some more relevant U.S. providers (but I speculate that you have not found an average provider for India).