[rgmerk]

How often/long does your power go out?

Americans on this site always mention grid failures as a concern about electric heating/cars/whatever.

While I won’t claim that power failures never happen where I live, because they do…but they’re very very rare and short enough not to care. The only exceptions are major natural disasters like hurricanes.

Americans, why do you have such a terrible electricity distribution grid?

[snuxoll]

Power outages aren’t an argument against heat pumps anyway. Without power my central fan can’t run and thus my forced air natural gas furnace is dead in the water.

Anyway, where I live in Boise most utility outages are due to physical damage - whether that be animals, auto accidents, extreme weather (not “it got cold”, but wind gusts toppled a tree that brought down a utility pole), and fiber seeking backhoes. Even had the gas get shut off at my old house because an auto accident hit some equipment a street down causing a gas leak.

[rainbowzootsuit]

I will compare some nominal power inputs to add perspective about the dead in the water forced air furnace.

I will compare a nominal 3Ton = 36,000 BTU/h (10.55kW) furnace+AC running at about 1200CFM with gas fuel input at 45,000 BTU/h to similar heat pump system outputs and electric resistance heat.

The central furnace fan is probably about 1/2 horsepower rating (372W) and has some design tolerance built in where the brake horsepower is less than this. The heating output at 80% efficiency is 36,000 BTU/h (10.55kW). This output is constant regardless of outside temperature. This could be run with a small inverter generator or possibly a robust battery system in the 20kWh range with appropriate solar.

Note that the heating input for this size of furnace can go up to ~155,000 BTU/h (45.4kW) with only the same amount of fan power needed in the form of electricity.

Looking through Mitsubishi literature, a 3ton hyper heat pump (SUZ-KA36NAHZ) at 17f can deliver 25400 BTU/h (7439 W) of heat output with an input of 2490 W. You will need strip heat to supplement this output to make up the difference (10.55kW - 7.439kW = 3.1kW of electric heat) So total power input is 3.1kW + 2.49kW = 5.6kW input for 10.55kW output. This might be short a few hundred watts as you still have to run the fan. This could be done with a larger portable generator.

http://mylinkdrive.com/USA/M_Series/R410A_Systems-1/Outdoor_...

Electric resistance heat would need the full 10,550 W to equal the output and now you need a relatively large fixed natural gas generator and transfer switch.

My personal opinion is that a heat pump system for normal operation with a natural gas or propane furnace as backup emergency heating is a good option to cover emergency situations as much as possible without adding an additional separate system like a wood burning heater or similar device.

[OJFord]

Would you even have gas for it to burn if there was no electricity to run its meter?

[josephcsible]

Every gas meter I've ever had has been purely mechanical. Have you ever seen one that needed mains electricity to work, and that acted like a shutoff valve when it lost it?

[irq]

You’re right about the gas meter, but the town/city infrastructure necessary to pump gas through said meter does rely on electricity. They have backups, but for how long? Long enough to ride out most power outages, but nothing unexpectedly extended.

Many rural houses have tanks on site because there are no public gas lines to connect to. My house has a 1000 gallon tank and is not vulnerable to the above, for example.

[NickNameNick]

Most reticulated gas networks use the pipe network itself as the storage facility.

eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_storage#Pipeline_c...

There may be more than a day of capacity just in the pipe network.

[NavinF]

Yes, natural gas pumps run on natural gas.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I've never heard of one.

[micro_cam]

It’s not bad where I am now in rural Montana but where I grew up near Seattle the power was off for a week plus most winters.

Lots of above ground power lines in heavily forested suburban sprawl means lots of branches in lines every wind storm and they (private) electric co has to visually check all of them before they can turn power back on.

Despite being much more rural the power coop that serves me now seems to never have an outage that lasts more then a few hours. Probally mostly because they have much less pine to check.

[UncleEntity]

> The only exceptions are major natural disasters like hurricanes.

Which is the same as with us Americans.

My last apartment had a handful of power outages and all except one was due to weather. The exception was a transformer that exploded — which seems common as I’ve seen at least three just randomly go boom.

When you get major weather events, where they are pulling in personnel from all over the nation, is when people get concerned about electric heating because it might take a while to get to them.

[eisa01]

Does American utilities not pay any compensation for power outages?

My local utility pays 50 EUR starting 12 hours after the start of an outage, and 4 EUR/hr after that. So a 2 day outage would pay out 200 EUR, and it all happens automatically.

There's no exceptions to this (only if you are at fault...), and this gets subtracted from their regulated revenues such that it hits the bottom line.

Naturally, most low voltage distribution lines are buried under ground

[mackatsol]

Not in Canada.. and this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. Mind you here we have a much much larger country to cover in infrastructure , so it’s cheaper to run above ground.

[hoorible]

Worth mentioning that I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life and I don’t remember a utilities outage lasting as long as 1/2 a day, so not sure a payout after that length of time would make sense anyways.

Our neighbourhood had an outage last winter during the -40 cold snap, and we were definitely at risk of water pipes freezing (gas fireplace was on, but without circulation it didn’t matter). The potential structural damage repair costs from outages up here would be insane, which makes me wonder if that’s part of why our grid seems so reliable (compared to other countries, anecdotally).

[NavinF]

When we complain about power outages, we're usually talking about 1 hour outages that happen every few years, not 12 hour outages.

[mtrower]

Where I'm at (Madison, WI), it's more like multiple times per year. This is a capitol city.

Recently, I stayed for three months on a mountain in Virginia. We lost power at least 6 times, usually for multiple hours. Once it was out half the day. There's a good reason the proprietor there keeps a backup generator on automatic failover.

[twothamendment]

I'm American, I think it isn't that bad, people are just like to whine and complain. America is also huge, so there is likely someone with a different experience and reason to complain.

My well pump is electric and I haven't been out of power long enough to be concerned about getting water.

[jjtheblunt]

We don’t. Power very very rarely fails, but when it has recently it’s been big infrastructures with flawed designs like the freezes in Texas, from what I’ve seen.

[zip1234]

The spread out housing means doing things like overhead power wires to save cost and reach further away places. Easily disrupted by fallen trees.

[midoridensha]

America doesn't have regular power outages; they're very infrequent and exceptional. However, when they do happen, they can be really big events, such as the big failure in the Northeast about a decade ago, and the infamous problem more recently in Texas during the winter. There's also local outages from natural disasters or extreme weather. Usually, very localized outages from storms (like falling trees) don't affect that many people and are repaired quickly. Outages from hurricanes, however, are bigger and take much longer to fix. What happened in Texas was just really bad planning and legislation, and only affected Texas.

[inamberclad]

It seems to depend on the area. In the SF Bay Area, wide scale power outages are rare. In Houston, most of my coworkers had small generators to keep their fridges and air conditioners running after a hurricane knocks out power.

[imoverclocked]

Depends on where you are in the SF Bay Area. The hills in the region often have week long outages every year. I always know when the power goes out because the valley in front of my house hums with the sound of generators.

[inamberclad]

Wide scale are the operative words...

[imoverclocked]

I mean, 10s of thousands of people isn’t wide scale? Weeks of teams of PG&E workers trying to restore power isn’t wide scale? What is the threshold here?

[imoverclocked]

Case and point, view the pge outage map right now.

https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outagecenter/

[8b16380d]

Isn’t pg and e still doing those wind shutdowns?

[MobiusHorizons]

Most of our distribution network is above ground, so areas with higher wind and older infrastructure are more prone to outages. When I used to live in Ukraine, power outages were rarely due to distribution infrastructure (which was underground in most of the city I lived in) and much more likely to be related to generating capacity. We would go through periods of rationing where there would be frequent outages that would last a few hours, but rarely long enough for food to go bad.

[qudat]

Like others mentioned, it depends on your region. I happen to live in a town surrounded by trees and the powerlines are above ground.

It’s very common for branches to break and knock out power lines in the summer during windy storms.

This usually means no power for 1-3 day stretches and only happens 1-3 times per year. So worst case it’s no power for 9 days total every year.

The problem is it usually hits in the hottest days of the year so people really complain — myself included.

WFH also makes matters more complicated.

[leashless]

Horrible weather.

Very very spread out population.

And huge spikes and troughs of infrastructure investment over decades.