Understanding US Power Outages – By Brian Potter
10 comments
·April 15, 2025bob1029
rbanffy
> I had a server with over 3 years of uptime
Dear God! Update that kernel!
sgt
3 years is nothing! I have a production server with 2400 days uptime. At this point getting to 3000 is more important than security.
rbanffy
What is it? An IBM z14? Counting PR/SM uptime is cheating.
braiamp
I mean, there's a reason why he doesn't have it anymore.
fabian2k
The conditions are quite different in Germany than the US, but the very high reliability of ~12 minutes outage per year on average as mentioned in the post does mean that many if not most people don't think at all about power outages here. I can remember only a single real outage for me in the last ~20 years or so, and that affected only a tiny area and was very quickly fixed after it was reported.
It does mean that the average German is probably not particularly well prepared for power outages, I bought a better flashlight and a bigger power bank after the one bigger outage I experienced.
ljf
After living in London where in 20 years I only experienced one power cut that lasted more than a few minutes (and it was about 2 hours, unfortunately the evening before a university paper needed submitting (printed and delivered in person the following morning as they used to be)), I now live more in the countryside. Just the other night we had a 2 hour plus powercut, and we seem to get about one a year - but I wonder if that is more down to local building work than regional issues, and it has never been due to weather.
EncomLab
We live in an ex-urban area of SW Ohio and after years of nearly zero outages, in the last two years we have had several 12+ hour outage events following pretty standard spring storms. We are experiencing a boom in new construction around us as farms are converting to new subdivisions, and have been told that electrical infrastructure is less stable while construction activities are occurring. All of the subdivisions have buried utilities - but they also all tie to a pole near the entrance, the poles all follow roads, and inevitably a car takes out a pole and entire neighborhoods go dark.
> Another important trend: power outages tend to be more severe in rural areas than in highly populated urban areas.
I've been getting a good taste of this one. If you want an excellent ~real time visualization of just how fragile these areas are, pull up the Entergy outage tracker the next time a hurricane rolls through Texas/Louisiana.
In my current neighborhood, approximately 90% of the homes have LNG standby generators. A typical outage in the area is at least 12 hours to resolve. With a catastrophic windstorm it takes upward of 2 weeks.
On the other end of the spectrum, I used to live close to the original Samsung factory in Austin. I was in an apartment that was fed with underground utility. I had a server with over 3 years of uptime and it was plugged directly into the wall. This was 2011-2014.
I think a lot of it boils down to your local infrastructure. If you pay really close attention to how the utilities are implemented at real estate transaction time, you can influence how much impact you would see during a disaster.
If you're in ERCOT and you absolutely cannot handle the idea of losing power ever again, buying something around Taylor, TX would probably be a good way to bunker up. You need to understand that the Koreans would never build another semiconductor factory in Texas if they didn't have incredible guarantees from the utility providers moving forward from that winter event.