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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't California have blackouts on, what would be considered in Europe as, a fequent basis?

And flex periods where it gets extremely expensive if you do use electricity. When my son was born we had no choice but to run the AC in a heat wave, during a flex period with rolling blackouts. That power bill sucked.

Both planned and unplanned. Get a bit of rain or light wind in LA and you'll see brownouts at the very least throughout the city. The past two years hasn't been so bad but previous to that the only place I had been with more frequent outages was Albania and Kosovo in 2005.

That’s a different issue. Base load power plants are supposed to produce maximum power as close to 24/7/365 days as possible. You don’t want a fully base load grid because demand isn’t constant.

Insufficient supply for rare peaks is a sign you lack peaking power plants.

California had a capacity-related blackout lasting less than an hour affecting fewer than 1% of customers, more than a year ago. So, no?

> California had a capacity-related blackout lasting less than an hour affecting fewer than 1% of customers, more than a year ago. So, no?

I'm not sure where you got your information, but last year more than 800,000 homes and businesses unexpectedly lost power for 2 days according to NBC[0].

This year, in order to prevent the unexpected loss of power, many people were subjected to Rolling Blackouts[1] where their power was scheduled to be turned off for hours at a time and they had no choice in the matter.

[0] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-warned-brace...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout

Oddly enough I prefer primary sources over mainstream TV stations.

http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid...

The characterization that anyone "lost power for 2 days" is totally wrong. The longest period of load shedding in August 2020 was 150 minutes affecting 300k customers. 500MW of load was disconnected, that's ~1% of the CAISO demand.

Load Shedding is the planned rolling blackouts.

People unexpectedly lost power for up to 2 days.

Power loss for 2 days has nothing to do with insufficient generating capacity. When that happens they do rolling blackouts across large area to avoid people freezers melting etc.

If nothing else demand varies over the course of the day so unless there is very widespread issues with generation like in Texas generation capacity should be sufficient at some point in the day.

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