RIP. For those who haven't seen it yet, he was interviewed in the HL2 20th Anniversary Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4 (intro and chapter 1 at 13:40)
The UK regulator introduced the Interruptions Incentive Scheme in 2002 to encourage distribution networks to reduce customer interruptions and minutes lost. It triggered a large wave of investment in network automation (remote switching, auto reclosers etc.)
So basically the difference between 9s is investment/cost.
At least here (Canada), utils push all of their costs to end-users & IIUC have an incentive to have high capex/low opex networks because of regulated return.
As a Canadian residential electrical customer, we pay a lot in base fees from what I hear relative to US customers. Sure it's more reliable, but tbh, it's not worth spending much to get 5 9s (5 mins of downtime a year) vs 4 9s (50 minutes/yr). Heck, even 500 minutes/yr would be fine for me.
But commercial/industrial users won't feel the same way, and managed to successfully spread the cost of adding 9s among users that largely don't care.
Its the same in the US. Except for texas which does some slightly more innovative things. Its really hard to do anything else than overbuild, Texas was strongly criticized for underbuilding its network when there was an ice storm a few years ago.
I have showdead enabled in my profile and I sometimes see new users that are shadowbanned (i.e. their posts/comments are automatically "dead"). If it's not spam or low quality, I'll vouch for them.
> If America wanted EULV fabrication, it had to be organized and funded by the state.
The DoE funded initial research in to EUV via the national labs and EUV LLC back in the 90s. The IP was licenced to ASML, whilst Canon and Nikon (the leaders in lithography at the time) were blocked.
People in government in the 90s made a good call, and we haven't done anything since then to ensure it actually played out, until the post WW2 world order was already extremely unstable.
We have had multiple rounds of "why are we paying for any of this?" In our federal government since then.
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