[Gathering6678]

We live in a big city now (though not exactly close to hospital or government), but my wife's hometown is a smallish rural town, and power outage is also extremely rare (less than once per year?) in the past decade or so. If you need e.g. oxygen ventilation at home, probably safer to have a backup generator or UPS, but I don't think anyone I know would need one at home.

I don't know about "remote rural". But in those places, I don't think anyone could afford an energy storage system even if needed......

[defrost]

UPS is as much about smoothing through "glitches" (lights flickering isn't a power outage but it will shutdown a desktop computer / NAS) as it is about power for a 20 minute outage.

Which prompts a question- do you run a server / destop / NAS type system, or are you one of the many phone / tablet / other device users that are already somewhat independant of the power grid being fully on 24/7?

Asking about "remote rural" wasn't about whether people there could afford off grid power of their own, rather it was about the grid quality and delivery for people that live there and rely on it.

Where I am we get relatively few "outages" (minutes without power) but glitches and 20 second outages are common enough in lightning season ( we get a lot of ground strikes compared to other ares of the world ) and the power lines and transformers are surge protected which is seen as glitching on the long arms of the delivery network.

[Gathering6678]

That makes sense. I am running a desktop PC as server, and a NAS for backup. Only the PC is protected by a UPS, and the NAS is directly connected to the socket. I can't recall experiencing any glitches actually...it was a bit more common ~20 years ago. Most of the outages were things like maintenance, or some guy at a construction site did something stupid.

As for the remote rural argument, I totally agree with you: it's just that I don't know about those places. What I said about affordability was regarding the article: I don't think Anker would be able to sell those in China, since those who might want one probably couldn't afford it.

[defrost]

I'm in Australia, typically I work remote areas, in the past globally (geophysical exploration) so I see power outages as "the norm" that you plan for.

Our cities (we only have a few big ones) all have pretty solid power delivery - as do most US large cities.

The US has "two" major grids, \1 most of the USofA, and 2\ Texas (which traditionally had minimal connection to elsewhere)

The \1 grid is most robust in the north east, patches into Canada (IIRC), and has some long connections to the West Coast.

Texas had some major outages in severe winter conditions, there's a whole story about that

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis

it's interesting as a systems failure.

Elsewhere in the US it's a function (by my guess) of how far some people are from major centres, whether there are major wildfires (california, and other parts), and if they're bridged across via "private" operators that have poor standards.

The US doesn't have uniform federal / state capital infrastructure (roads, rail, powerlines, telecomms, sewerage, water, etc) which is a strength / weakness depending on how people view these things.

[seanmcdirmid]

American regional grids aren’t strongly connected, you aren’t getting much electricity between America west (eg Washington state) and the mountain west grid (eg utah). There is one big connection between a coal plant in Utah and LA, everything else is just connected by lines with very small capacity. If the west coast somehow tripped…we have better chance of getting help from BC than Wyoming or Utah.

[defrost]

Fair comment, my apologies if I conveyed that they were.

There's enough weak connection to accomadate some slosh that helps to smooth things and enough long connections to have potential issues in geomagnetic storms - although these should be well and truly mitigated by now.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm

^ Québec, but interconnected with NE USofA.

[seanmcdirmid]

I just wanted to point out that while Texas is completely disconnected, the regional grids are still only partially connected, but I guess this is only relevant for the west where areas of sparse population densities make strong connections very difficult. This is relevant when someone complains about EVs on the west coast using coal powered electricity rather than hydro and renewables that makes up much of the west coast's energy mix. Technically kind of true since Utah is connected via socal (they are changing this to a renewable link though), but not really since the other connections are pretty small.