Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Monday he is prepared to cut off electricity exports to the U.S. if President Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods go through. “If they want to try to annihil…
That’s excessive compared to the extremely low risk of a blackout in developed countries (excluding the United States which has regular blackouts). To illustrate:
US households spent 5.5 hours without electricity on average in 2022. Excluding major events like hurricanes, the number drops to 2.1 hours.
German households spent a whopping 12.2 minutes without electricity on average in 2022.
A portable gas heater, blankets and a camping stove are completely sufficient for the average person considering most longer power outages last for a couple of hours at worst. Exceedingly rare longer blackouts will always have a government aid program, such as a heated gym with free food, near your location.
The only one’s who should really prepare for blackouts are:
the government
people who live hours away from civilization with very limited infrastructure connecting them
We’ve had a couple storms this winter. One of them I lost power for 4 hours, but a friend of mine in the next town over was out 4 days. And some didn’t lose at all, so it varies. Power outages like this aren’t too rare every year.
It doesn’t bode well for our freezers, but we don’t get cold enough to be anything other than cold and inconvenient. Easily remedied by temporary solutions you mentioned.
Until you discover that the gas infrastructure and your home heather need electricity to function. You better have an old fashion gas stove as backup that you can use until gas pressure drops too much. You could get bottles of gas and a camping heater but every year people die because they use these indoors and get CO poisoning so be careful.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of generators? All the popular propane heaters in the US have CO shutoffs. There’s not really a point to using a heater outdoors in the first place unless it’s one of the huge ones that take a 20 pound tank and very obviously shouldn’t be used indoors.
Trust me, I would love to get ride of gas, but my stove does work fine without power. Also, utilities generally don’t go down because of weather, since they have backup power on site.
Normally they should have backup, but places like Texas saved a few bucks on backups and their maintenance so their gas lines went down too. That was in the 2021 power crisis. Deregulations and increasingly weird weather is a bad combination.
Gas is terrible until the power grid goes down in the middle of winter.
Electric should definitely be the main go to but we should all have gas hookup for a backup heat source in my opinion.
That’s excessive compared to the extremely low risk of a blackout in developed countries (excluding the United States which has regular blackouts). To illustrate:
US households spent 5.5 hours without electricity on average in 2022. Excluding major events like hurricanes, the number drops to 2.1 hours.
German households spent a whopping 12.2 minutes without electricity on average in 2022.
A portable gas heater, blankets and a camping stove are completely sufficient for the average person considering most longer power outages last for a couple of hours at worst. Exceedingly rare longer blackouts will always have a government aid program, such as a heated gym with free food, near your location.
The only one’s who should really prepare for blackouts are:
I agree, though here’s my anecdote from the PNW.
We’ve had a couple storms this winter. One of them I lost power for 4 hours, but a friend of mine in the next town over was out 4 days. And some didn’t lose at all, so it varies. Power outages like this aren’t too rare every year.
It doesn’t bode well for our freezers, but we don’t get cold enough to be anything other than cold and inconvenient. Easily remedied by temporary solutions you mentioned.
Until you discover that the gas infrastructure and your home heather need electricity to function. You better have an old fashion gas stove as backup that you can use until gas pressure drops too much. You could get bottles of gas and a camping heater but every year people die because they use these indoors and get CO poisoning so be careful.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of generators? All the popular propane heaters in the US have CO shutoffs. There’s not really a point to using a heater outdoors in the first place unless it’s one of the huge ones that take a 20 pound tank and very obviously shouldn’t be used indoors.
Trust me, I would love to get ride of gas, but my stove does work fine without power. Also, utilities generally don’t go down because of weather, since they have backup power on site.
Normally they should have backup, but places like Texas saved a few bucks on backups and their maintenance so their gas lines went down too. That was in the 2021 power crisis. Deregulations and increasingly weird weather is a bad combination.