[cobookman]

You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period.

1 rolling black out every 20 years isn't all that crazy. Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

[the_mitsuhiko]

> You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period.

Do you have some numbers for that? The only load shedding I remember in Europe was done through turning off large consumers and they would typically do this on their side.

[mpweiher]

> most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black out

Name one?

I've never experienced (or heard) of one in Germany, for example, during my lifetime.

And of course it's not "rolling blackout", but "rolling blackouts", plural.

[baskire]

Here’s two examples of power grid failures in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-...

[morelisp]

The size (not always duration) of outage in your second link would be considered routine in many American cities. To take SF as an example:

- 2020, well, here you go

- 2018/2019 should also need no overview, CA is probably the worst power situation in OECD countries in the 21st century

- 2017, 88k without power https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/21/power-outage-sh...

- 2016, 23k https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/14/pge-power-outag...

- 2015, 45k https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/06/08/thousands-of-ba...

I'm only picking the first Google result for each year. I could keep going but I hope the point is made: Berlin got a blackout once in a decade like most American cities get multiple times a year. It reacted comparatively slowly because it's so infrequent there was no recovery plan. The political impact of the outage was huge, the country's attitude was that everything is collapsing - and by "collapsing", they mean "like America is all the time."

[tripletao]

> Berlin got a blackout once in a decade like most American cities get multiple times a year.

The Berlin power outage linked above was over thirty hours, and the SF outages you linked were a few hours. To bury that in "(not always duration)" seems misleading to me. That said, the 2019 power cuts were indeed approaching third-world duration and frequency, to the point that homeowners who could afford it applied the usual third-world workarounds (gas generators, etc.). That was mostly outside the biggest cities, but huge numbers of people were affected.

And how did we get from SF to "most American cities"? California's grid reliability is notoriously and distinctively bad, and a huge political topic here too (though with little progress after many years). The World Bank[1] puts the overall USA's quality of electricity supply solidly in the middle of high-income countries though, slightly ahead of Germany.

We also seem to be mixing load shedding (i.e., the utility realizes they can't safely supply all their customers and therefore deliberately cuts power to some) with accidental outages. They look the same to the customer, but perhaps imply different kinds of bad planning by the utility.

1. https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/ha7db856d?country...

[morelisp]

> We also seem to be mixing load shedding... with accidental outages.

Not 'we'; I'm well-aware of the difference but the person I was responding to gave examples of accidental outages.

The US has considerably more of both than Europe, especially Germany (SAIDI measured in hours vs. 15-20 minutes), regardless of what investment-focused metrics the World Bank is giving.

[mpweiher]

> how did we get from SF to "most American cities"

2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/08/07/blacko...

https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2020/08/12/chicago-black...

https://www.nola.com/news/article_a64debc0-c3dc-11ea-8d5a-57...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/11/detroit...

https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/07...

...

2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_blackout_of_July_201...

https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/07/22/dt...

https://www.rt.com/usa/385646-blackouts-hit-la-ny-sf/

etc.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/detroit-hit-by-major-power-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977

Note that the Berlin blackout affected 30000 people and was caused by a construction company cutting through a cable. All of these affected many more (Chicago: 800K), occur rather frequently and seem to be caused by regular phenomena like weather.

One major reason is that so much of power-distribution is above-ground, on these poles you see everywhere. Storms will knock these over or have falling trees take them down.

>We also seem to be mixing load shedding ... with accidental outages.

Yes. The claim was that "most 1st world countries" experience rolling blackouts. That's not true.

[tripletao]

To be clear, I agree that most developed countries don't routinely experience rolling blackouts like the one that just happened in California. This includes the USA, unless we count twice in twenty years in the state with the worst grid as "routinely". I don't think it's useful to compare anecdotes, though I'd note again that most of the outages linked above are far shorter than the Berlin outage. Anyone who believes that most American cities experience multiple thirty-hour, 30k-customer outages per year (as the comment I first replied to implied, despite the hedge with "not always duration") is mistaken.

morelisp's later comment linked to SAIDI numbers for the USA and Germany, and by that standard[1] Germany is indeed far better than the USA, about 4.5 nines to our 3.5. Singapore[2] is yet better, about 6 nines. The USA is far worse than the EU average, somewhere around Italian[3] standards. That's an undeniable difference, though I'm not sure all of that is attributable to incompetent American operators (though certainly some is, as PG&E has repeatedly shown).

The grid can't target perfect reliability, since the cost for that would exceed the benefit in almost all applications. It's cheaper to provide backup power for the few exceptions (data centers, medical, etc.). The cost per customer to achieve a certain reliability will be higher with lower population density. The cost for backup power is fixed. So the economically efficient grid reliability should be worse with lower population density, which seems to be what we see empirically--Australia is bad too, for example. I'd guess that much of the difference is simply because the USA has decided that Germany-level reliability isn't cost-effective, in the same way that Germany has decided that Singapore-level reliability isn't cost-effective. I'd guess the World Bank ranking I cited somehow tries to capture that fact and therefore ranks all three countries about the same, though I can't find any details of their methodology.

1. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid...

2. https://www.ema.gov.sg/cmsmedia/Publications_and_Statistics/...

3. https://www.occto.or.jp/en/information_disclosure/miscellane... , Tables 45 and 46

[dmode]

I don’t know what you are comparing. A power outage due to an accident, affecting a limited population is very different than blackouts. Such emergency outages happen every day

[morelisp]

> I don’t know what you are comparing

I'm comparing what the parent asked to compare, even though it's not load shedding.

> Such emergency outages happen every day

In America. Not Germany. Like, yes, literally some level of outage occurs daily, but it's an order of magnitude difference.

US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37652

Germany: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/Companies/S...

[mpweiher]

The subject and question was specifically rolling blackouts and neither of those were rolling blackouts, so no, try again.

Of course failures happen, for example when I was living in Mountain View we had a blackout because a squirrel committed suicide by chewing through a high voltage cable. Or when I was living in Detroit, we were without power and heating for 3 days due to an ice storm. It was a pretty large (and long) outage, and we had freezing temperatures inside the house. Generators were sold out for 500 miles.

Ahh found it: 1985, 370K customers affected

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_in_Michigan

Rolling blackouts are planned power outages because of insufficient capacity.

And note that these rolling blackouts are happening again and again.

[khuey]

I don't know about most but it's certainly not unheard of in places with similar climates. https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/rolling-bla...

[vondur]

This is more specific to California, not the US as a whole.

[morelisp]

> Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

I don't know, California, how about you start by spending the billions you need to make sure people just baseline don't burn to death, and then we'll see what delivery reliability looks like?

[rlanday]

Didn’t PG&E also have to shut off a bunch of people’s power last summer to try to avoid burning down any more cities? I recall there was talk about this happening for an entire decade. So really at this point it seems like summer blackouts might be happening every summer in California for the foreseeable future.