Lovely. Avista Power/ inentional blackout in Spokane (Spokamentro)

72bluNblu said
The difference is we’re (mostly) equipped to handle temperatures like what there seeing now. The NorthWest isn’t just seeing record temperatures for June or July, they’re seeing ALL-TIME record temperatures. Like not in recorded history at that location temperatures. Lots of places up around Seattle don’t have AC, they’re not set up for temps like this because they don’t get them. 112*F in Portland? That’s literally never happened before.

When I moved into the dorms at UCSD there was a heat wave. Temps were in the low 100’s. For where I’m at in Northern California that’s not a big deal. Certainly not record breaking for Sacramento. But for La Jolla that’s crazy. Same kinda deal, lots of places don’t even have AC down there because 99.9% of the time you don’t even need to think about it. People there died from heat causes at temperatures lower than the average temps around here.

The power grid operators get a little less sympathy. I get it, this doesn’t happen very often. Or at least it didn’t used to. But you should be prepared for more than just business as usual. Like Texas and the cold snap and snow they had last winter. Does it happen very often? No. But in Texas it had happened to a smaller extent before. And the technology to deal with it is definitely out there. The NW right now I understand a little more, like I said, they’re breaking all-time records. It gets pretty hot where I’m at in California, and they’re tying our all time highs in some places up there. So yeah, some things that don’t normally happen (like rolling blackouts) are gonna happen, because that’s where you’re at right now.

Our grid in the US is pretty crappy though. No one wants to pay for upgrades, the infrastructure is old and outdated. Better tech is out there but the energy CEO’s would rather line their pockets and pay off the shareholders. Same crap with PG&E here. Raise the rates to pay for the inspections they should have been doing the whole time to prevent burning up whole communities. Paradise burned because a 97 year old tower failed. A tower built in 1921. Like most places still didn’t have electricity at that point. Maybe could have seen that coming for a couple decades?

It’s senseless that all these houses up here don’t have AC. My mom and dad bought central AC in 1972. No later than April every year it would run. Usually up to October. I can’t tell you how many times we had family and friends come over and stay the night because they couldn’t sleep in the sweat boxes they lived in.

We moved 2 blocks in 1978 and that piss poor built house didn’t have AC. By the spring of 1979 my parents had the AC installed.

When we moved to their brand new house in 2014, we made sure it had AC.

In 2000, a life long friend bought a new house. When he and the fiancée were deciding on what they wanted, I spent 3 hours on the phone with them convincing them to spend the money and get AC. They are both cheap screws. I had to remind him how many nights he and his family slept on our living room floor because they didn’t have AC. And we nicknamed their house the sweat box. Because it was. That first summer he called me and thanked me for not letting him cheap screw out.

In 1999 I was working for a guy who never had AC. In fact, when I had my house built in 1998, I had AC installed and he thought I was nuts. His furnace went out and he wasn’t going to do AC. I said my AC runs from March through October and he thought I was nuts. Luckily, the company doing the install of the new furnace convinced him to do AC. He was stunned how often they used it. When they moved to their new house, they made sure it had AC.

The problem is the morons that live here think it never gets hot enough to need AC. They are wrong. Any new house should never be built without AC.