Originally Posted by Rodney

What is laughingly called the power grid in my area is more like a long, raveled, piece of string with a lot of knots in it. Power for 200,000 people comes in on one pair of towers, side by side.

Where I live, Santa Cruz, CA, we probably lose electricity 20 times a year: summer, winter, rainy days, windy days, hot days. It might be for two minutes, two hours, or eight hours. And I live in the center of town, not out in the boonies.

We're in a mixed rural/urban area, and a lot of the lines go through wooded area and our beloved Pig Goat and Elephant utility, since they deregulated, does a crappy job of keeping trees cut back from the lines. And again, our "grid" is so bad that one guy in a car ramming the wrong power pole along a highway can black out 10,000 customers; has happened. Today, problems caused by wind blacked out half of town for three hours.

I used to live in San Francisco, and we _never_ lost power. How reliable is the power in your area? Any horror stories? Any shining examples of reliable utilities?