I’m curious as to what the reasons for such regular shutoffs are. I’m now 24 years old and I cannot recall ever experiencing a power outage, ever. So either I’m extraordinarily lucky or they aren’t as common here
I live in rural CO, and we get them pretty regularly. Extreme weather is pretty common out here, and the infrastructure isn’t as redundant for the mountain communities (I assume due to the cost/benefit ratio of building new lines).
It’s not just power - we had a forest fire one year that burned a microwave tower & killed our cell phones _and_ internet for a week. The local businesses struggled for a day or two, because no one really carries cash anymore.
I should add that kind of like the OP, I added an enphase LiFePO4 house battery and panels. They’ll keep critical loads running basically indefinitely, which has been a welcome change. We have gas heat, but I used to get nervous in the winter when the power went out (our boiler requires electricity to run).
I live outside Seattle. We frequently get outages because trees fall on the lines. As most of where I live is glacier carved terrain, the soil conditions are very difficult for both undergrounding cables and for tree root establishment. When there is sustained heavy rains, the ground saturates, and if there are high winds afterwards, trees fall over.
I'm worse off than many, because I live on an island, and my electric service comes in across the water from a penisula. There's an awful lot of non-redundant paths through the penisula. On the island, there is no redundancy either, but there is a plan to create a ring between the three substations, which should help.
Most of my outages are only a few seconds. At the substation, they have reclosers [1], circuit breakers that will open when shorts or abnormal currents are detected, and then quickly reclose (thus the name) as many shorts are transient.
But when a tree falls on the line, that needs a truck rolled out to investigate, and often another one or two to repair. And conditions are similar across the area, so if one tree is on a line, there will be many. My local infrastructure is low priority because it serves few customers.
Ice storms are pretty nasty too, because then you've got potentially a lot more trees falling, and also hazardous road conditions that prevent or slow repair work.
When I lived in other places, power outages were much more rare. I would have never considered a whole house generator in those places, but I have one here and most of the houses I looked at had them. I would certainly install one if there wasn't one already.
