Nature, reasons, and increasing frequency
The total country outage in Ecuador had me wondering. There seems to be more outages today than ever before and it reminded me of the Eastern North America cascade failure 20 years ago. The reasons were similar but as one looks into frequency and cause some things become apparent.
Outages occur for many reasons. Weather related incidents are likely most common with high winds, ice, fallen trees, or lightening. Human error and equipment failure are other factors but then so are squirrels. I once had an alarm from servers at a school which claimed power failure problems. On investigation, I quickly realized the building had some power, but not the server room circuits so I checked at the breakers. None of them had tripped but some things had power while others did not. It was the loss of one phase and when I contacted the power company I was told they were on it – a squirrel had caused a transformer to blow.
Other squirrels may be those in media trying to blame the increase on climate issues alone. The stark truth is much of the power grid has not been maintained well and capacity issues have not been addressed. More is plugged in and charging today than ever before and the electric car push isn’t exactly helping. Population increase is another factor not talked about. More people, more demand. Media misses fails to recognize that the same areas of major outages are also the highest populated. Texas, California, and Florida are in that boat – high population and high outage rates. Hot days with more people using AC means a grid that just can’t sustain the usage.
Other countries are having outages but not for weather, failure, or population reasons. Economic issues forced many countries to suffer electrical shutdown too. Others countries face the same capacity issues with demand outpacing production forcing rolling outages. To attribute all our power woes to climate is no better than the squirrel that gets too close to the transformer. Increased demand without increased production coupled with poor upkeep is a significant factor that cannot be overlooked.