terryc said:
Who is your supplier?
I'm on Integral and you expect a few hours once a month. I suspect
they are butchering the wrong trees.
I'm on Energy Australia's network. Significant outgages are not that
common, but they do happen. A friend was without power for an extended
period because of the Chatswood substation fire in 1999. That fire
affected 23,000 people.
There are annecdotal reports of transformers being subject to ad-hoc
cooling with fire hoses to prevent them from overheating. This doesn't
lend confidence that the infrastructure is up to the task of handling
high temperatures.
Part of Victoria's recent power problem arose because Basslink
apparently cannot operate at full capacity in high ambient temperatures
(that is, exactly when it's likely to be most needed).
And of course, from the USA and UK and Europe (Switerland/Italy) we've
seen how power systems can have cascading failures that can take 24
hours to put right. Thought at least we're not likely to see outages
caused by freezing rain.
After the UK had its huge windstorm some 20 years back, some country
properperties were without power for a couple of weeks. I my self was
without power for 12 hours or so. One doesn't realise just how dependent
one is on power until it goes off. Even our stove was electric. I ended
up making tea by sticking a cup of water next to a gas fire (I prefer
electric fan heaters. I'd kept the gas connected, and paid the service
charge, just in case).
I also lived in the UK during a year long miners' strike, and we had
rotating blackouts lasting three hours on several nights a week. That
was a real pain.
Here in NSW we were fortunate that the heatwave occurred most severely
at the weekend when power demands tend to be lower. Had it occurred a
couple of days earlier, NSW reserves would have been stretched.
And of course there's the bushfire season, where bushfires can
compromise transmission lines (and did so last year, or perhsp a few
years before - Parliament House got cut off!).
My main concern is an extended power loss during a worse heatwave then
the one we've just had. I'm not trying to run the entire house - just
the study, with its airconditioning and computers, which has a floor big
enough to drag a a matress or too into to sleep on if the outgage
continues into the night.
How much it's really worth spending on protecting against something that
may never happen, well that's another question, but the price is not
just to address the issue when it arises, it's, like insurance, to
provide assurance that the risk is being managed, one way or the other.
Sylvia.