There must be a single hour in which a million people concurrently lose power for the full hour.
1,000
3.00@Fion I expect they've turned off notifications from comments on their posts. Is anybody on discord or Twitter? Maybe there would be another avenue to ask them to resolve.
UK households urged to reduce energy use to avoid winter power cuts:
National Grid warns of three-hour blackouts in ‘extreme’ gas and electricity supply scenario
and some reassuring words (from France reassures UK on maintaining winter electricity flows):
“My advice to everyone is to pray for a mild winter,” said Niall Trimble, managing director of the consultancy The Energy Contract Company.
I'd like to talk to the people who trade in this group https://chat.whatsapp.com/FeuhJL7K9Gv2wRMnGApjLz
I'm bad at this, but this should be much less likely than https://manifold.markets/NathanpmYoung/will-the-uk-have-more-than-20000-pe, so I bought some NO to adjust the markets.
@NathanpmYoung We lost power for over 24h in East Sussex last winter, so I don't know about 'very rare'
@NathanpmYoung Power was restored gradually to different areas, but 39,000 were affected for over a day I think: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-60452584
@NathanpmYoung Sorry, focused on my area's prolonged outage (thought this was the total hours question). Storm Eunice as a whole caused 1.4m to lose power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Eunice (presumably for over an hour?). On 9 August 2019 there was an outage that led to 1m to lose power, too.
'very rare' is subjective, but it seems slightly more common than that to me. For this question, do you need it to be one event, or can the number accumulate over lots of small outages?
pinging you again @NathanpmYoung — would two groups of >500,000 (different) people experiencing a >1h power outage (at different points in time this winter) resolve this positively?
@finnhambly They are usually pretty quick at restoring power for most people, the 9 August 2019 outage was less than an hour as was the 2003 London blackout (which was <1mn anyway). Not sure either way about the Storm Eunice one (though it's not included in this list even though 1mn people for >1h would satisfy the list's criteria, but of course it's not complete)
@amoebus Yeah my experience is that things are repaired quickly, but I also think the Wikipedia page is just missing lots of examples:
The St Jude Storm of October 2013 saw winds topping 99 mph leaving 850,000 homes without electricity. February 2020 saw Storm Ciara. This saw some parts of Britain saw a month and a half’s rainfall in less than a day. Winds of up to 97 mph damaged the electricity network and left 770,000 without power. While last autumn, around 500,000 were left without electricity after Storm Arwen battered much of the country.
from https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2022/02/21/storm-eunice-february-2022/ I don't know how long the power loss was for in any of these cases, unfortunately, and maybe the power loss is transient for the majority of them. Ofc not clear how # of households translates into # of people in each case, too.
I didn't spend much time thinking about the right percentage for this when putting M$ down before, but think it's worth assuming this will occur above the base rate in the coming years because of the gas shortage (and slightly increased chances of rolling blackouts). Also, there are likely to be more instability events like 9 August 2019 due to distributed generation (and poorly-integrated inverters generally).
The chances that these factors cause a major event is pretty small, but the challenges of integrating large offshore wind, EVs, and distributed generation is pretty unprecedented, and not enough is being done to manage this adequately (from what I understand of the situation) and it will be even harder/more costly to burn gas to cover sudden power loss this winter.