Living in Finland, there's always news about tens of thousands of households being left without power for days after particularly heavy winter storms. It works as a reminder that yes, some people do still live in rural backwoods, their local electricity distribution depending on fragile wires suspended on wooden poles. Whereas living in a town of any size, blackouts caused by weather simply never happen.
Since the Tapani storm of 2011 there's been a massive undergrounding of the power grid, so much of the rural areas are now also quite safe from outages. But there are still a lot of the old type of grid left and the economics for undergrounding those are increasingly unfavorable. Perhaps grid connected batteries next to the transformers might soon be more economical for many of these areas. They could serve other functions beside backup power, after all.
Yeah. That's partly why it feels so foreign to me that these blackouts would still affect tens of thousands of homes.
The Tapani storm was such a divisive experience. In the city the only effect of the storm I remember was that the windows were ringing quite a bit that night. Otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.
