With the dubiously motivated PG&E blackouts in California there are many stories about how lack of power is a serious problem, especially for people with medical dependencies on electricity. Examples they give include people who:
Have severe sleep apnea, and can’t safely sleep without a CPAP.
Sleep on a mattress that needs continous electricity to prevent it from deflating.
Need to keep their insulin refrigerated.
Use a medicine delivery system that requires electricity every four hours to operate.
This outage was dangerous for them and others, but it also seems like a big problem that they’re in a position where they need absolutely reliable grid power. Even without politically motivated outages, the grid isn’t built to a standard of complete reliabilty.
There’s an awkward valley between “reasonably reliable, but with a major outage every few years in a storm or something” and “completely reliable, and you can trust your life on it” where the system is reliable enough that we stop thinking of it as something that might go away but it’s not so reliable that we should.
We can’t get California out of this valley by investing to the point that there won’t be outages; earthquakes, if nothing else, ensure that. So instead we should plan for outages, and make outages frequent enough that this planning will actually happen. Specifically:
Insurance should cover backup power supplies for medical equipment, and they should be issued by default.
When there hasn’t been an outage in ~1y, there should be a test outage to uncover unknown dependencies.
Apropos of my other comment on SRE/complex system failure applications to writing/math, this is a known practice: if a service is too reliable for a time and has exceeded its promised ‘error budget’, it will be deliberately taken down to make sure the promised number of errors happen.
From ch4
Thanks! Chubby planned outages were in fact one of the things I was thinking about in writing this, but I hadn’t known that it was public outside Google.
(Quite a lot is public outside Google, I’ve found. It’s not necessarily easy to find, but whenever I talk to Googlers or visit, I find out less than I expected. Only a few things I’ve been told genuinely surprised me, and honestly, I suspected them anyway. Google’s transparency is considerably underrated.)
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Do you know more about how this works, or know where I could read about it? Searching online I wasn’t able to find anyone talking about the system or consumer-facing docs on how to notify the power company and what to expect if you do.
Does it cover damage from natural disasters? Flooding, wind, earthquakes?
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I found https://www.energymadeeasy.gov.au/sites/default/files/1519_AER Life Support DL Brochure_D02.pdf which seems to say:
You’re responsible for figuring out backup power for your medical equipment
If you register with your utility they have to notify you before they turn off your power, but unexpected outages can still happen.
This doesn’t sound that different from most countries? And sounds much less strict that you were describing.
Registering looks like visiting https://www.synergy.net.au/Your-home/Manage-account/Register-for-life-support or the equivalent for your utility.
I also found https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/content/a4094ca5-dc6a-4dfb-bbe7-8aa9a3baa831/Life-Support-rule-change-RRC0009-Final-Rule-For-Publication.pdf which gives what I think are the full rules with obligations for retailers and distributors, which doesn’t change my understanding from above. The only way it looks like this would have been different in Australia is that the power company would have been required to give more notice.
Specifically, they talk about: “retailer planned interruptions”, “distributor planned interruptions”, and “unplanned interruptions”. And then they say:
The retailer can’t intentionally turn off the power except by following the rules for “retailer planned interruptions”, which include “4 business days written notice”.
Same for the distributor, for “distributor planned interruptions”
I’m having trouble finding the official rules, but I found an example commercial contract (https://www.essentialenergy.com.au/-/media/Project/EssentialEnergy/Website/Files/Our-Network/AERApprovedDeemedHV.pdf?la=en&hash=FA1892961DBA269D0B82E2416991FF9FDFAE25DD) which has:
So it sounds like a shutdown like the one in CA, being for safety reasons (preventing sparking a fire) might qualify under the rules for unplanned interruptions, and so not require any notice at all.
Interesting insight—could you explain why you think they are dubious and politically motivated ? Thks
I haven’t looked into it fully, but it sounds to me like after PG&E was found liable for the Camp Fire they’re responding by trying to pressure the government into not having them be liable (“if we’re liable then we just can’t take the risk of operating on dry days with high-wind”) instead of doing things to reduce the risk of fires (clearing brush).
Good point about everyone needing to have backup plans for power outages.
Another observation is: It’s crazy that few people were aware that an outage would be happening with elevated probability until the day of. It probably would have avoided $1B in marginal lost productivity to have proper communication.
You will be disappointed to learn that the electric companies all around the United States have little incentive to care about their poles leading to residential areas, because those areas use half as much power as industrial customers. So outages of a few hours after every thunderstorm are pretty common in Midwestern cities.
And yes, our society is woefully unprepared to go more than two hours without power. I really think we should be prepared for five days at all times (not that I am, but just saying). To prepare for such things would be massively expensive and radically change communities if they had to undergo regular stress tests lasting 12 hours or so.
I agree that power outages kill, in a statistical sense: some will die without A/C, some will eat bad food, etc. I disagree that humans have no responsibility over their own safety and health. Almost all services are provided on a best-efforts basis. Police aren’t liable if a known criminal attacks you. FDA isn’t liable for denying you a life-saving drug. Insurance companies aren’t (despite appearances) money machines—any additional benefit comes with increased premiums, and they’re pretty much never liable for your suffering.
You can argue that (some of) the current California outages are negligent or are negligently handled (not enough notice or assistance to those whose health is impacted). Courts can sort that out, slowly and usually in favor of the more expensive legal team.
In the meantime, if you need power, you need to have enough backup to be able to survive an outage, and to travel somewhere safer if it lasts too long. Whether insurance covers it is a separate issue, unrelated to your ultimate responsibility for yourself.
Where do you read me as saying “humans have no responsibility over their own safety and health”?
I read the passive voice in your recommendations about insurance and top-down testing as an indication that you don’t think the primary responsibility for preparedness is in individuals. The lack of any recommendation for individual action (have batteries, test and replace them annually, consider whether to leave the area for long-term disruptions) is another data point toward this reading. I apologize if I misunderstood your intent.
I think individuals should take steps to be more prepared, and the main reason they don’t is that the grid’s reliability falls into an awkward valley where it’s reliable enough that you think you can count on it but not so reliable that you should. Planned outages would help fix this, and I expect people would respond by planning.
Backup power supplies are going to be good for a given amount of time. How do you plan to regulate how much of an outage should be possible to buffer with backup energy generation?