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Page added on May 29, 2013
International Power Outage Comparisons
The above (Fig 1.2a of Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System) shows a measure of total electric grid outage duration across a sample of countries in the world. The measure is SAIDI = System Average Interruption Duration Index. This is the total number of minutes per year of outage experienced by an average customer, but it explicitly excludes major events (hurricanes, earthquakes). Most utility outage measurements are reported exclusive of major events. This is irritating if one is interested in the climate change signal, but understandable for utilities trying to measure their endogenous performance, rather than exogenous events that they can’t control in their own operations.
The data are for 1992-2001, but this measure is fairly stable over time, so it’s probably not too different now. Japan is the best with only 6 minutes of average outage. That’s six-nines reliability (99.9999% uptime). By contrast, the US experience is over three hours (99.96% uptime). The developing countries in the sample range from a few hours (Argentina) to a few days (Columbia) of outage per year.
I don’t have any big point to make about this, but it’s interesting background about how reliable the electricity supply is in industrial civilization.
Again, exclusive of major events, SAIDI has not been increasing lately in the US:
One occasionally hears some extreme “peak everything” writers forecasting the collapse of the electrical grid due to lack of fossil fuel. No hint of that so far.
5 Comments on "International Power Outage Comparisons"
BillT on Thu, 30th May 2013 2:18 am
While I find the numbers interesting, I don’t see any relevance to any topic.
I live in the Philippines, Manila to be exact. Occasionally, power goes out for a few hours, usually when there is scheduled maintenance on the lines nearby and not city wide. Occasionally there is a vehicle accident that takes it down for a while, but in 5 years, that has only happened once locally. The same thing happened when I lived in the US and more frequently.
But, eventually the outages will be more and longer until…
DC on Thu, 30th May 2013 6:21 am
Why would grids collapse right away due to fuel shortages?
A:They wont at least not right away, or even for a while. Grid is critical so it will get priority for fuel. However, while the grid gets all it needs, the drive-shop-consume part of the economy continues its fitful and up down decline. Since people that are broke tend not require fossil fuel they cant really afford anymore-this tends to ensure that critical systems are going to function reasonably well throughout the long emergency.
The lights will stay on for a long time, but the pool of taxpayers will keep shrinking all the while. Of course while all this is going on, actual upgrades and maintenance take a backseat to just patching things up-so eventually yes, even critical systems will someday start to collapse at a faster clip.
The US of debts leaders know this-that is why they are busy planting stories about ‘hackers+terrorizts’ out to get the good ol US’s grid. That way, water shortages for damns and PP cooling due to mismanagement, population pressures and corporate greed in the for-profit energy sector won’t be to ‘blame’.
It will be radicalized muslims or Chinese of course…
Kenz300 on Thu, 30th May 2013 5:30 pm
A good reason to move to more distributed and local power solutions.
The large utilities are trying to hang on tho their old business model but it is clear that distributed power is the future.
Wind and solar are growing around the word with more homes and businesses looking to provide some of their own power to reduce costs and to improve reliability.
STORY: Fighting Blackouts: Japan Residential PV and Energy Storage Market Flourishing
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/05/fighting-blackouts-japan-residential-pv-and-energy-storage-market-flourishing
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