Gotta love our nation's decaying power grid.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Yes, yet another power failure at Ace’s house. Right in the middle of a metropolis with over 300,000 people. The aging power grid in this country is just sad. Thirty year old power poles just waiting for the first puff of wind to snap off. Tree limbs overhanging lines. It doesn’t take much for the lights to go out. This is our fourth outage since last Christmas. Yeah, we spent Christmas and the next five days in the dark too.

We actually made it through last nights storm with power. Storm ended about midnight. 6 AM bright clear sky, birds chirping, and out goes the power. I called it in and the helpful robot voice says crews are on the way and it’ll be back on by 8:30AM. So off to Dennys we go for Breakfast and some much needed AC.

8AM robot voice calls me and regretfully says power will be back at 3PM. :dubious: So, out to the shed I go. Drag the 70lb generator out. Drag out three extension cords. Get the fridge hooked up, satellite receiver, tv, and of course a fan all hooked up. Oh yeah, made a pot of coffee too.

We’re doing pretty good, watching tv and enjoying the fan when the power comes on an hour later. :smack: One whole hour of generator time. So now I spend twenty minutes dragging the generator back into the shed and rolling up extension cords.

The power failure is bad enough. But the CYA repair estimate of 3pm chafes my buttocks. Had they given an honest estimate we would have happily spent that hour without power. I could have hooked up the generator at 6AM. But they said power would be back at 8:30. I’m not dragging that generator out for 2 hours. Unless of course I’m mislead by a robot voice.

Gotta love Entergy.

I am thankful we kept power last night. The 10pm news said 1000 people were out in my county last night. Their weekend sort of sucked balls too. But at least we got power until the next storm comes along.

2

“Our nation” being the U.S., I presume.

3

Apparently, just Arkansas.
Which isn’t actually a nation.

4

That’s a problem for your local utility company to address, in coordination with local citizens.
Not national failure of a national grid.

5

Well if the shoe fits. :wink: I guess the post applies to any nation with a aging and unreliable power gird. But I’m using the one in the U.S.

I feel for the crews working for Entergy. Entergy has been cutting costs and crews for a long time. It’s left them understaffed to the point that they often bring in crews from out of state after big winter storms knock out power. It’s tough work and long hours for the repair crews.

Most of my frustration is with the company itself. I wish they’d replace rotten power poles instead of waiting for them to fall down. My street light pole finally snapped in the Christmas storm last year. I’ve lived in this house almost 25 years and that pole was never replaced. None of the wooden light poles on this street have been replaced unless they snapped during a storm.

Relatives and friends in other states have told me it’s the same there too. They lose power several times a year. All it takes is one over hanging tree limb or a rotten pole that snaps to short out a whole street or even a block.

6

There* are* serious issues with the electrical power grid in this country. This thread is not about that; it’s about municipal power transmission.

7

Odd. Entergy is a Free Market™ American entrepreneur, traded on the New York Stock Exchange and, axiomatically performing the best among all possible Entergys in all possible universes.

Where I live, electricity is supplied by a state-owned Socialist enterprise, directed by a government with a corruption index far far worse than that of the U.S. We have frequent outages, often caused by drunken drivers ramming into power poles, or grossly overloaded sugarcane trucks that manage to snag a wire.

Yet, amazingly, the electricity usually comes back on in an hour or two! Perhaps it helps that we’re only two miles from the nearest electric company office. I’m impressed since many of the outages occur on windy stormy evenings. (Fortunate, since outages on hot dry days would be intolerable: we don’t have a generator to run our air conditioner.)

I would not say the repair service is perfect. Once, while attaching wires to a transformer, they connected the neutral wire to a phase for a minute or two. That killed a TV and a fan regulater in our home. Damn socialists!

8

I recall reading a few years ago that power in Iraq sometimes only came on for a few hours a day. They could only supply a limited amount and that was it.

I guess we’ve been spoiled in the U.S. Our Great Grandparents and Grandparents built the Power Grid starting back in the 30’s with the TVA. Nearly all of our Nuclear Reactors were built in the 50’s and 60’s. They are getting pretty old now and haven’t been replaced. Arkansas Nuclear One came online in 74 and it’s had a lot of renovations just in the past year. They’re trying hard to squeeze more years out of it.

The coal fired plants are old too. The entire power grid needs some serious upgrades.

9

Some of my european gaming buddies are convinced they really need to find some way to get me moved over from this barbarous country - the crappy medical system, the crappy power transmission system, and the crappy internet we have is ‘positively medieval’:stuck_out_tongue:

We have 2 generators - one for 220 for the water pump, heating and AC, and 110 for the cable - tv and internet, a refrigerator, a freezer, a couple lights and recharging our cell phones. I am really considering starting to sneak solar into the household systems maybe starting small and doing parts of the barn and poultry house. I would absolutely love to have enough solar to go off grid.

We have done a number of things - changed to more energy efficient lighting, I am using my tablet for surfing the internet and email instead of cranking up my desktop. Instead of turning on the TV, we are using my tablet more [mrAru and I tend to like spending evenings in our room instead of the living room - smaller space, less AC and we only need a single task light and the tablet to relax and get entertained.] We have dried our laundry on a line outside or a rack inside for years instead of using a mechanical drier, and washing in cold water pretty much all the time. We tend to do ‘navy showers’ instead of standing under copious amounts of hot water for 20-30 minutes. I also love cooking and heating with my wood stove in the winter :stuck_out_tongue:

10

I think a LOT of this kind of thing depends on where you live.

ERCOT seems pretty reliable from where I sit; no major blackouts that I’m aware of, and when rolling brownouts have been needed, they’ve been announced in advance.

My internet isn’t bad; I get 18-20 MBPS via a VDSL line, and it’s nothing special- just AT&T’s UVerse offering, and it’s comparable to most European internet connections from what I can tell.

11

Unacceptable! Time for a transfer switch. Power goes out? Head for the basement/garage/closet and flip a switch. Or 6.

And you’ll only need one generator. Bring in 220, and use 2 circuits for the pump, and singles for all other circuits.

Couldn’t be easier. Unless you get the automatic system…

12

We’ve lived in our house for 15 years. We’ve had one power outage that lasted 2 hours. We might get a quick flicker during a bad storm, but, the power grid in Seattle is alive and well.

13

KCP&L has what appears to be an aggressive tree trimming plan, but we still lost power a month ago.

In that case, though, I think it was a tree that was uprooted and took out a pole - so I don’t know that I can yell about that one too much.

As for the estimates - I’d guess they are more accurate the fewer people that are out. In a large scale outage, they may think you’re out due to a large feeder. Then when they fix that, it turns there is also a local line or two down.

Not that bad estimates aren’t annoying.

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They will gladly upgrade your transmission system to state-of-the-art, assuming you are willing to pay for it.

15

Coincidentally, this was just in the news:

10 years after blackout, US grid faces new threats

On a national level, the major problems are the northeast and southwest. Those areas are overloaded, and tend to see a lot more problems than other areas, especially in the heat of summer with everyone’s AC running.

Both of those areas are also ripe for another cascade failure, which is how you get the really big power outages (multi-state, lasts for days). The “experts” say they have improved the grid and that sort of thing won’t happen again, but that’s what they said before the last one too. Personally, I predict we’ll have another one within the next decade or two.

That’s pretty close to my experience as well. We’ve lived in our house for 16 years. The power went out once for a couple of hours because a transformer on our street blew up, then a few years later we were out for several hours because of a major fault at the substation (distribution transformer exploded and caught fire). Other than that, nothing but a few minor blips here and there, and not much of that. A hurricane came right over our house (we’re inland a bit so I guess it was technically a tropical storm by the time it hit us) and the power didn’t even blink. That surprised me, too, because we’re in an older area with mostly overhead lines.

I have never lived in a place that has had crappy power like the OP describes, and none of my friends or relatives complain about that sort of thing either. I’m sure it happens in some areas, but it’s not common, at least not anywhere that I have personal experience with.

As for the OP, I second the recommendation for installing a proper generator with a transfer switch.

And as for griping about inaccurate estimates, they do the best they can. For example, if a transformer goes KABOOM they know pretty much how long it takes to replace it. But what they don’t know is what else blew up when the transformer went. So they replace the transformer, kick the line back on, and if it trips then they have to go figure out what else is all futzed up, and that’s the part that can’t be easily predicted. Sometimes there’s nothing else wrong, and they get done way ahead of their schedule. Sometimes there are all kinds of secondary faults, and the repair takes even longer than they predicted.

Give 'em a break. They are doing the best they can.

16

I feel for you. I’m in suburban Chicago, and we get widespread outages every time we get a big storm (primarily from trees knocking down power lines).

Last summer, we suffered six separate outages, four of which lasted over a day, and two of which lasted about 3 days each (and, honestly, we were luckier than some people, who lost their power for the better part of a week). ComEd apparently hasn’t kept up with tree pruning, or maintenance as they should.

I finally broke down this spring and bought a generator. We haven’t had an outage since. My neighbors ought to thank me. :wink:

17

Best suggestion? Keep calling. make sure every house # that is out has a report of lost power. If you see where the line is down? Tell them.

After it is fixed, every time a light flickers or dims? Call them.
Every. Single. Time.

18

I experienced this when I lived in Woodridge. Multiple neighborhood-wide outages in the year and a half I was there, including one lasting for almost a week in the dog days of summer. Turning on the hair dryer caused the lights to dim. Since moving to New York, I haven’t had so much as a flicker.

19

Guess you weren’t there in December 2006, when the windstorm knocked down trees and major portions of the city and surrounding areas were dark for days.

Where I was staying (Bel-Red Road, near Marymoor park), there was no electricity for over six days.

20

aceplace57 you seem to be confusing your local power distribution system with the national grid. It’s kind of like stating that the interstate highway system is bad because your local streets have potholes. The National Grid most definitely needs attention but the symptoms you describe are local. Not that I disagree with your position that the quality is deteriorating. From an end user position it doesn’t really matter why the service is getting worse it just matters that it is getting worse.

This really isn’t a result of deterioration either. Utilities have been shipping services to each other during crisis for decades. I worked with crews from hundreds of miles away who were shipped to my utility during an ice storm in 1984 and I remember numerous times when our local projects got shelved because our crews were sent to other utilities to do storm clean-up. Union workers even have negotiated rates in place for being assigned to neighboring utilities. It’s just part of utilities following well documented reliability procedures.