Power outages -- How often in your area?

Here, the power is pretty reliable.

The power goes out (for over five minutes) about once or twice a year.

When it does go out for a while, it could be relatively short, or it could be out for as much as a few of hours.

The worst is when it happens when I'm trying to sleep because I use a CPAP machine, so I cannot sleep until the power comes back on.

I don't actually have sleep apnea any more, but I sleep much better with the CPAP machine.

The Arctic doesn’t have heat, humidity, rain, squirrels, dust, not nearly as much salt in the air, and the lines/ equipment is probably much newer.

I’ve heard stories about the unreliable power grid in the USA before… One even mentioned that in some areas if one energy supplier fails, it might take down a larger part of the grid due to overloading the other suppliers.

Here in The Netherlands we have a pretty reliable power grid. For as far as I can remember we had one short power outage in the last 5 years in my area. In my country it doesn’t matter who you have as a power company: The network is maintained by a semi governmental company. Everybody can start a power company and provide the power grid with energy. Our power bill consists of (basically) two parts: Energy usage and a fixed part for the network provider (so they can maintain the power grid). By doing this all power companies are just as reliable.

In town it’s very reliable. Usually a squirrel and the transformer fuse are the problem.
It’s amazing how loud a BANG they make if they cross the wire right.
We have a transformer just behind our house. Sounds like a gun going off. It’s happened twice.

Every now and then someone will hit a power pole with a car and knock out a neighborhood for a while.
A few years ago a monster ice storm really messed things up for a while. It was so bad the power Co. couldn’t get their folks out to the locations.

At a ranch we visit, it’s assumed the power will go off anytime there is a thunderstorm, or any other darn thing.
But it’s a’ways form town.
Like no cell coverage, and it’s South of the Border Patrol checkpoint.
Just got the BLF LT1 in this week. Looking forward to our next visit.
Bet money the power will be fine the whole time.
All the Best,
Jeff

Our power is extremely reliable. Much more reliable than the neighbors. But then our power comes from our own solar panels connected to our own LiFePO4 battery bank whereas the neighbors are on the local power grid with above ground power lines that trees fall on too often. :money_mouth_face:

Of course when the neighbors power fails they can sit back and let somebody else do the repairs. If we have a failure it is all up to me. Our power has failed once since 2005 when the system was installed. In 2012 a lightning strike took out many $$ worth of hardware. I had spares and got power going in a couple of hours, so not too bad, but I was lucky to be home, although I could have done without the accompanying pyrotechnics. Since then the lightning protective gear has been expanded and improved.

Unexpected: 1-2 times a year
Mike

The Scottish power grid is fairly robust. It has to be, because we get several storms with high winds every winter and we wouldn’t have any power from October to March otherwise.

This computer’s been running continuously since the middle of March, so that was the last power cut. Two minutes and back on again.

We had a glitchy evening last autumn where we lost power several times for a second or two each time. I gave up, shut everything down and read some of the books I keep downloaded on my tablet. All fine again the next morning.

The last time we had a power cut we could measure in hours was two or three years ago, when we lost power for about two hours one morning. I can’t remember anything worse than 24 hours in my entire life, so that’s across a few decades.

The NL powergrid has a lot of redundancy. In domestic areas that is a given fact. In rural areas it may not always be the case. The average user connected to the NL powergrid enjoys a reliability of 99.996%. This can be devided in 1 min/y in the national grid (110kV and up), and 20 min/y in regional grids (0.4-50kV).
Apologies are in order for being a bore, I have worked (too) long as some kind of licenced bean counter in the energy trading business, where a difference of 0.001c/kWh means success or failure.

Hartford, KS went down weekly for 8 years. Mostly glitches and short time-frames… this from a company that HAD 450k customers (and now has over a million since a merger last year).

What sucked is I am ONE of the 750 TOTAL Solar PV installs out of those 450k served and my anti-aliasing (protection from my inverters) would shut down for 20 minutes every time it glitched. So I would lose 5-7% of my production some days when it was really bad.

Then, one day a smart guy at the electric company figured it was costing more to fix the same line (that broke all the time) with a new line. Three miles of new cable later and it now only glitches every few months. That’s the problem with living in a small town (pop. 500). Half the town had to bitch until someone finally decided to replace a 30 yr old line (we were paying TOP dollar for those eight years).

Thankfully, our former dumb-ass governor got run out of Topeka (finally!) and the “Corporate Commission” (which USED to serve the public and WAS rightly called the “Public Utilities Commission” back in the day) was reorg’ed and immediately STOPPED allowing Westar to charge demand fees to we solar users. Their former (also dumb-ass) CEO spent more than we cost IN TEN YEARS trying to screw ONLY solar users on rates. We were 750 out of 450k users- do the math :wink:

So good ending after so many idiots (local and state) who just really don’t want to move along with technology we should be promoting- daily! IMHO :wink:

You’re probably thinking about the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Basically, due to poor maintenance and negligence, one supplier experienced a series of failures that caused their system to shut down. Since, their computers could not adequately detect and notify them and other systems of the situation, other suppliers lines became overloaded and started tripping out. This led to a cascade of all, or almost all, of the Northeast Grid shutting down.

Outside of this failure, most of the USA and Canada power grid’s reliability is probably on par with what you’re accustomed to in The Netherlands. For example, in North Carolina, most local outages are from trees being downed during a strong storm. Likewise, large outages are typically caused by hurricanes and ice storms. Depending on how many outages occur from a passing storm system, restoration usually takes from a few hours to the next day. Larger events where outside crews are called in, restoration may take a few days; and for some, a few weeks.

Forest fires are the biggest culprit when you live in beautiful wooded country. They can take out miles of poles and wire, but we see more steel poles being placed these days. Storms can cause havoc too, but after the town of Paradise was destroyed when malfunctioning electrical equipment started a forest fire, they have been removing trees near the lines for many, many months (and still are).
So we have been having at least three outages a year, sometimes triple that. Everyone owns either solar or a generator. The worst ones will last for days, but some are just for hours. Still, I will not move back to a city for better power and worse lifestyle. And now we might start having fewer incidents with all the improvements.

Very uncommon over here and when it fails it only lasts minutes.

Zero outages unless some damnfool knocks over a pole-pig or something, and that was only twice that I can remember.

Got through all those hurricanes like Sandy and… unno, Edgar or wotnahell the other one was. Power, cellphone, innernet, no interruptions at all.

I’ll certainly give credit where it’s due.

They’re very rare here, we haven’t had one in quite a few years. Every couple years a portion of our road will loose power due to a localised failure, but the distribution company start digging up the road within an hour of it happening so they never last long.

I can’t remember the last time power went out. It has been years. Anything built in Las Vegas after around 1980 has underground power lines. We get winds as high as 70 mph occasionally and the only homes affected are older ones with regular power lines mounted on wooden poles.

Here it is very unusual to have power outages. When it happens, normally is due to some heavier storms, but even then it doesn’t last long!
But that is always a good time to play with flashlights :smiley: :partying_face:

2003, now I feel old for remembering this :smiley:

Over here we don’t have (there is only one part left where we still have those; Krimpenerwaard. Total length of 37,5 miles/60 km) above the ground low voltage (<110kV) networks. I think it mainly has to do with us being a small country with a large population density. So there are nog outages because of poles being downed :slight_smile:

Where I’m at here in FL, our Co-Op does a decent job. Power has only had prolonged outages from hurricane hits. Irma took us out for 10 days, which was the only significant interruption.
I do have a really sensitive re-closer in my network close by that seems to trip just about lightning strike, and knocks us out for 5 minutes, 8-10 times a storm. But I have all the pertinent necessities on UPS systems, along with whole house surge protection.

Never. Nothing that can go wrong during a few drops of water or a few gusts of wind. :wink:

When demand for power is high they switch us off 2-4 times a day for between 2-4 hours at a time. Thanks to the Covid 19 crisis it seems power demand is lower than normal at the moment.We have not had any outages since the beginning of lockdown.