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.
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.
Any time the Santa Ana winds pick up in so cal they turn the power off to prevent fires now so yeah the US power infrastructure is shit compared to Germany. Over there it’s all underground because when they rebuilt after ww2 they realized it’s dumb to have it be so easy to blow up your power grid with bombs.
If you have any residential overhead distribution, that’s gonna drag you down compared to everything buried. It still counts as downtime of a tree did it.
wklauss|1 year ago
Source: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303
In 2023, German households experienced an average of 13.7 minutes of power outages.
Source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Power-supply-13-7-minutes-of-po...
Not sure if the metrics are 100% comparable (they seem to be?) but points to a huge difference in reliability.
jillesvangurp|1 year ago
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.
jwr|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
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MR4D|1 year ago
PGE has to de-energize lines to prevent fires. Hurricanes just blow them down.
dylan604|1 year ago
Let's not think that weather has nothing to do with any of this. That would just be beyond insulting
tcoff91|1 year ago
PaulDavisThe1st|1 year ago
cinntaile|1 year ago
michael1999|1 year ago