I live in a part of the world where powercuts are pretty frequent. 1 per day is normal. They last between 1 and 8 hours. A day without powercuts feels like a special occasion.
My machine is powered by a desktop ups which is terrible. It is only supposed to power everything for a few minutes to shutdown safely. But it is cheap and I don’t know much about other affordable alternatives.
How do you folks who self host at home deal with powercuts? Any recommendations? 8 hours of uptime from a ups sounds almost impossible or totally unaffordable to me.
Ah. Texas.
I am totally out of the loop. Why is Texas’s power grid that bad right now?
Not just the GOP, but privatization of public goods and services. Profit motive is a terrible way to run a power grid.
I’m honestly dumbfounded how that can happen in the US. Here in Germany power outages are rare, maybe a few minutes in 8 years.
I really don’t get how something so important is left so broken in the biggest economy on earth.
I’m not trying to be mean.
Few reasons. First, the United States is huge. Texas alone is twice the size of Germany. Second, the U.S. has three main power grids. The left half, the right half, and Texas. It’s a little more complex than that, but the important part is that Texas is on its own. Third, Texas hates people. They let companies deregulate to hell and back, even at the expense of its residents.
The combination of being on its own power grid, deregulating that power grid and the companies that maintain it, and not taking proper precautions to protect its residents all leads to a less-than-reliable power grid when it gets hit with any non-standard weather. Texas especially needs to prepare for climate change, but things could definitely be going better…
Also not trying to be mean, but energy in the US is generally very cheap ($0.12/kwh where I am). With more regulation of the market, the reliability would probably increase but so would the price! (I see this happen first hand since I work in the industry)
