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U.S. electricity customers averaged five and one-half hours of power interruptions in 2022 Source: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303 https:

• MR4D 2y ago
  Germany doesn’t have hurricanes or wildfires. Take those out and I’d bet the grids are much more comparable. PGE has to de-energize lines to prevent fires. Hurricanes just blow them down.
  • wklauss 2y ago
    The links actually cover this, since EIA tracks major events in power disruptions and separates them in the graph. US network is still orders of magnitude worse than Germany.
• dylan604 2y ago
  How many hurricanes did Germany have in 2023? How many tornadoes did Germany have in 2023? Let's not think that weather has nothing to do with any of this. That would just be beyond insulting
  • stefan_ 2y ago
    Underground powerlines are the norm in Germany, hurricanes, tornadoes or not and their grid would still perform vastly better.
    • Moto7451 2y ago
      Atlanta, GA has underground power transmission through much of the city (and specifically my neighborhood within the city) and we can still lose power in storms. What isn’t underground currently is being moved there in much of the city. However, the transmission equipment is still outside and still has physical limits. There’s only so much water, so much wind, and so much lightning electrical systems can take without someone going dark. Underground trunks can also flood and short so they’re not a full panacea in areas that have heavy storms. We’ve had a mild storm season the past two years and we’ve maybe been down seconds in total in my area. While the average I’m sure is correct, the distribution is going to depend a lot on what is going on with nature. When I lived in California I lived in an LADWP area so I didn’t experience rolling blackouts. As a kid I had friends that would come over because they lived in an Edison area and play time in air conditioning at my house was much more enjoyable in August. If you were to find the average downtime during that period of time I expect it would saddle everyone with 10-15 minutes of outages even though my area never went down and my friends lost power for a few hours each week during heat waves.
      • wklauss 2y ago
        I wish that was the case. Coincidentally, I live in Atlanta, also within the city (ITP, close to Piedmont Park) and all my neighborhood has above ground power transmission. Coming from Europe, it's infuriating. Not a year passes that we don't get two or three blackouts and a fair decent number of brownouts. That includes the past two years.
  • wongarsu 2y ago
    If I read the provided source correctly, if you exclude those events the average US customer still has two hours of power outages per year. That's a lot better than five, but still nearly an order of magnitude worse than 13 minutes.
• jwr 2y ago
  As an anectdotal data point, I live in Poland (Warsaw) and I can't remember the last time I had a power interruption at my home. I don't use UPSs at all, and my NAS gets years of uptime, unless I decide to reboot it. This gets much worse if you live in the countryside, for obvious reasons, and I would guess that the German average is mostly driven by countryside, not big cities.
  • wongarsu 2y ago
    The typical German experience could be described as "every decades your street loses power for two hours at a time" (which comes out to about that average). As you say, it's worse in rural areas and better in urban areas, though maybe less extreme than in Poland. But power interruptions are typically short and highly localized. Nobody would even think of getting a generator in case the power goes out, and outside a server room nobody has an UPS
    • bee_rider 2y ago
      Ah, but a power outage is kind of fun. It is like a little bit of survivalism, but you know the power will be back fairly soon. There’s a whole ritual, fill the tub, get some candles, figure out how to keep the food cold. Next you’ll tell me you don’t have snow days.
      • jwr 2y ago
        > Next you’ll tell me you don’t have snow days well, actually… :-)
    • nkrisc 2y ago
      Anecdotally, everyone I know in the US who has a generator didn’t get it because of random power outages, but because of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and blizzards.
      • wyldfire 2y ago
        Don't those natural disasters get included one way or another into an outage calculation? I suppose parts of the US have more exposure to those disasters than Germany btw.
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• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  My alarm clock (old school radio alarm clock with big red digits) is plugged in and resets to 00:00 when there's no power. I would notice even the smallest outage this way (unless it happens exactly at midnight and lasts less than a minute). That has happened maybe twice over the last 16 years. In both cases the outages were a few minutes at best. I live in Berlin; power outages are extremely rare here. That 13.7 minutes is not for all house holds. In the rare case an outage happen, the very limited amount of households affected by that would experience that duration on average. And lets face it if something knocks out a major power line, which does happen, that single incident might take a few hours to resolve and would probably drag that average way up. Which means that I expect the median outage duration is probably a lot lower than the average; in the order of seconds or minutes at best. "The number of interruptions per customer in 2023 was 0.34, which means that each customer is only affected by a disruption once every three years on average." That sounds more like it. I generally only adjust the time on my alarm clock when daylight saving requires me to; twice a year.
  • ahartmetz 2y ago
    Yes, super rare and short in Berlin. I'm originally from a rural area where overground high voltage lines between villages are common. There it's typically 1-2 hours of outage every 3-5 years or so. The local utility company has some truck-mounted generators to help out in smaller outages.