This is stark reminder that we should not take our privileges for granted. We don't think about continuous stream of power through our plugs as a privilege (or at all) but it's not trivial, considering so many might have the latest macbook but not always the power to run it (and to even more people the idea of owning a computer is on the same level as flying to Jupiter).
It isn't a privilege. You've been paying for it along with the maintenance and future planning that should have been performed but wasn't. Being "grateful" for having electricity most of the time is just Stockholm syndrome.
I don't think they're arguing electricity is a privilege and can/should be taken away (like, for example, a drivers license), rather that we are very lucky to have this constant stream of power that many do not
> We don't think about continuous stream of power through our plugs as a privilege
It's wealth, not a privilege. And it doesn't stop there. Cell-phone connectivity, broad-band access, "always on". These things are prerequisite to make all those web apps work seemingness. I don't hear a lot of discussion about that.
Walking the dog last night I did wonder, what would it be like if our street lights just stopped working? Not that unrealistic a scenario; I mean our electricity network is pretty solid, but a power outage is a matter of when, not if.
My street lights went out a few years ago. Really a beautiful night, great to experience true darkness in a city. OTOH, walking around was a bit treacherous, sidewalks are not as flat as you think.
Regardless, I have a small titanium 1xAAA LED flashlight on my keychain, an 18650 red (preserves night vision) LED flashlight in my shoulder bag, and a 4xD white LED maglite in the trunk. Do most people not do this?
I can’t see needing them for a streetlight outage, though.
I wonder if we'll end up with individual home storage, eg Tesla Powerwall or similar. Then you fill it up when there's grid, you use it when there isn't, and you just have to manage the charge level.
Not likely. California has too much to offer most ($3 trillion economy). People will get solar (mandatory on new construction residential roofs now after Jan 2020) and Powerwalls and carry on.
It's not okay. PG&E should be nationalized and the infrastructure properly managed and invested in (including burying distribution and high voltage transmission lines), instead of profits being syphoned off for shareholders while the electrical grid crumbles. But we're not there yet (political courage and whatnot), and these are the options available.
If you have a better idea for those who want to remain in the state (disclaimer: not a CA resident, no judgement), propose and implement it.
> PG&E should be nationalized and the infrastructure properly managed and invested in (including burying distribution and high voltage transmission lines), instead of profits being syphoned off for shareholders while the electrical grid crumbles.
Unfortunately, some of the other comments here make it clear that government corruption is a common cause of similar power shortages in other parts of the world. I don't think your claim that the government would be a better manager is tenable.
US government bodies do not face the same lack of accountability, transparency, and governance faced by South African governments.
> I don't think your claim that the government would be a better manager is tenable.
I'm unsure how one can make that claim. I'm unaware of any other parts of the US or other developed nations that are experiencing rolling blackouts due to utility mismanagement.
That'll just make things worse unless its supplemented with e.g. home solar. If they can't afford to produce enough power, trying to suck down extra power during the uptimes to hold for the downtimes won't help.
We had a similar app in Kathmandu. City cut of power to certain zones on an hourly basis, the app helped tracked the powers eventual return and pending cutoff. The amount of activity in the neighborhood when the power comes back on, screams of Batti Aiyo could be heard all around. Turns out it was entirely preventable and that it was all due to an enormous amount of corruption between the Nepalese Energy authority and factories around the country. One guy came into the authority and changed it all for the better and brought all the corruption into the open. Definitely made living here just that much easier.
It's been a fact of life here as long as I've been alive and there is no indication that it'll improve in my lifetime either.
Even now as I type this there has been no electricity for 1 hour and won't be until another hour. There are about four 2-3 hour blackouts every day throughout the year.
We have always had to schedule every technology-related activity around it. When I was a kid, if there was a blackout during our favorite TV show, we had to go to someone else's house that had electricity or a generator.
We scramble to finish chores that rely on electricity when there's a blackout imminent. Of course there are always random unscheduled blackouts too so you can't really predict them.
Even now in almost 2020, almost every person here has a smartphone and quite a few have Macs etc but we still don't have 24/7 electricity. Almost every middle class house has their own generator and solar/UPS system.
I've never been able to participate in online groups or activities like gaming, collaboration or freelancing for long because of this (on top of unreliable internet too), because I can't expect people in better countries to re-accommodate their schedules around my periods of forced downtime.
"We actually have a whole market of private large generators owners that sell you electricity to mitigate this."
Do they use the existing municipal infrastructure or do they need to lay new cables ???.
We have rotational 2 hourly load shedding on bad days here in South Africa as our state owned power company has no spare capacity and the power stations are old so they tend to break down often.
Our local FTH internet provider discovered the first time that happened after fiber rollout in our area when all their ONT's went online at the same time asking for authentication.
I'm guessing they put a generator per building, and if you pay them, they'll wire your unit up to the generator? Probably split the cabling after the meter (you wouldn't want the municipal meter to be counting power you're buying privately) and allow for a 2nd set of cables as input, with a big switch to toggle between the two.
Notice the "green light" in the picture. This is to inform people in the neighborhood that it's "generator's electricity", so they cannot use washing mashing and water heaters.
The cable from the generator reaches the house after the meter, there's an automatic switch to take current from the generator only when there's no electricity from the government.
On that note: there are currently massive anti-government protests happening throughout Lebanon, against rampant corruption in the establishment, which is behind the broken electricity sector (amongst others).
I needed something like this when I was in India for 5 months! Except there was no generator, so I'd just sleep my laptop when it ran out of battery. At least I didn't try using a desktop.
I was interested in monitoring it at the time, so I wrote SMC voltmeter, an app to measure the input voltage. If you're interested in auto-detecting the power source to your laptop, my open-source code might be useful, so please give it a look!
If I lived here, I would fit an Arduino and a bunch of SSR's to my electrical breaker box.
The Arduino would detect use of the generator, and detect load on the generator (with a current clamp), and if the load was too high, start shedding power-hungry devices like electric heaters, driers, ovens, etc.
The order of switch off would be programmable, and some devices like fridges or heaters could be programmed to only run on utility power to save money.
Total hardware cost of $30 would pay for itself quickly in both saved generation bills as well as a better quality of life, and the design/build cost of a few days would easily be recouped by selling devices to all my neighbours.
Turn fridge and heaters off? How do then keep food fresh, or heat homes?
It’s not how it works, in Lebanon you pay the generator “company” a monthly fee independent of your consumption, but dependent on max amperage you wish to get.
The electricity already cuts off (circuit breaker) if you go beyond it (e.g. use a hairdryer).
Some people “cheat” that system by pouring saline into the circuit breaker causing it to rust from the inside, this it would never break.
South Africa also has rolling blackouts every few months. We have apps to notify us when it'll happen on our phones. A lot of us have accepted it as normal by now.
Yup, only trouble is the app says "stage 3 loadshedding" and then your power is on. The next day the app says "no loadshedding" and hey look, the power is off.
This varies a bit, in rural areas it can be much worse, but often the municipalities are the culprits there. Even in some JHB suburbs you are never quite sure if it is the muni or loadshedding, but recently I have noticed that the FB hordes somehow manage to sniff out the exact transformer that failed...
This would have been useful in South Africa if that key assumption "thankfully the cut-off are almost always on schedule" had held.
EDIT: We still have apps though. It's just a mystery sometimes when your power is on and the app says "STAGE 4 LOADSHEDDING [U R SCREWED]" and strangely the power is still on. The converse is more annoying of course.
You could get something like an iotawatt hooked up to your wifi with CT sensors on your mains breaker and get live readings of your power usage as well as "sense" when the power changes from Public to Diesel Gen. https://iotawatt.com/
How does this work? Do you have two feeds into your house, one from the power grid and one from the generator-grid? Did the generator company lay new power lines to every house?
Or do you lease the generator and run it in your garage, but the generator maker somehow bills you for power consumed rather than just running hours?
Funny, I have a habit of reading HN comments before clicking on the actual link, and thought the link would be about the planned outages here in the SF bay area :)
The limiting factor is manufacturing capacity. Tesla limits where they sell Powerwalls and solar roofs because they can't make them fast enough to meet nationwide (or worldwide) demand.
