These people don't have access to the grid. That's the issue to begin with.

The tricky thing in cold climates is the part of the year when solar power is lowest but electricity use, for heating, is highest. Sometimes they have hydro or something.

Try that again with 99% renewable and it becomes much more reasonable with regards to over overcapacity. 1% non-renewable would be a very good outcome.

And what was the storage requirement? I just ran those parameters myself with China's 2.9 TW of constant electricity demand, and the storage requirement was over 70,000 GWh of battery storage.

By comparison, global battery production is around 1,000 GWh per year.

It's their 2060 plan. Take it up with the CPP.

Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less.

Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.

If that’s your first thought, then you’ll hate this influential perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Better make sure they don't depend on AWS, then.

It's very location dependent fwiw.

In the UK, I think I can remember 3 power outages my entire life. One when there was significant flooding in my hometown as a child, which lasted around a day, once at university for a few hours (local substation failed) and recently 30 minutes overnight while they were upgrading something (with a lot of notice). I may be undercounting/misremembering but I don't think its far off.

I think the main difference is the UK in all but mostly rural areas has all the power lines underground. This is very different in eg North America where you can go a few blocks out of downtown areas and it is all overhead delivery.

Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages.

Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them.

I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though.

And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.

The grid where I live has a target of 89 minutes of unplanned power outages per year for urban customers and somewhere in the high 200s for long rural feeder lines. This is in Australia, where serving outlying customers comes with some geographical challenges. I think it's currently sitting at 99.998% reliability. I can't remember the last unplanned outage longer than a couple of minutes, although they did some planned work last year and took out our power for half an hour.

I'm surprised that someone would think days of power outages are normal everywhere. My family used to get hit with 8+ hour outages every few years back in the 90s because we were at the end of a single long rural feeder line, and we thought that was an unacceptable frequency.

I don’t know where you live, but I experienced outage in Budapest once in at least 10 years while I lived there. And only one phase was out, not all. We even lamented with my friends that we didn’t even remember when was the last time when something like that happened. I never had to reconfigure the clock on my microwave, just for daylight saving time. I know that even 30 kms from there my granddad still experiences outages monthly, but there are places where that happens very-very rarely nowadays.

I lost power for 10h in my city recently and it was a big fucking deal. The last 5 years that's the first time that happened. I would say I have less than a hour of downtime per year in the other years

PS I don't live in the US.

Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago?

What city do you live in?

> I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.

Because people are too busy playing Team Politics instead of solving issues that everyone can get behind.

Fixing the power grid is one of those things that everyone could get behind, and yeah I agree, it disproportionately affects the economically disadvantaged.

It is funny to me how fractally perverse systems gets when a centralised authority refuses to directly solve a problem but rather decide have it solved by third party uncooperative players by creating an endless stream of byzantine rules to force the solution to be a twisted copy of what the centralised authority could have done by itself.

Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me