Comment by yongjik
4 days ago
Have been in California for 10+ years and I've never seen anyone describing California's electricity infra as reliable. It shows the same kind of failure that's too familiar to many Americans: a vital service is managed by a corporation that has no incentive for better services, and market forces do not work due to the nature of the service. (If the power at your home in SF goes out all the time, it's not like you can find another provider - the best you can do is move to, say, Nevada, which is not realistic for most people.)
I lived in California until 2018; I think I missed the beginning of the premptive outages during high winds/fire danger, but the grid sections I lived in were much more reliable where I live now, near Seattle with PSE as the utility power supplier. I was also out of CA in the post-Enron rolling blackout era.
The PNW has a more challenging environment with respect to trees pulling down lines than suburban California; I expect two nines of utility power availability here; some years will get three nines. When I was in California, many years had no outages and I don't remember any years where I had less than 99.9% availability. Even when I did eventually decide to get a UPS, it was just because one day there were several brief interruptions.
Obviously, local conditions vary, and I managed to avoid the two recent periods of larger scale grid instability, but at least in my bubble, nobody talked about grid reliability, because it was just there. Plenty of complaints about rates and how long it would take to get service changes.