Your personal value for reliability isn’t relevant. The electric grid is providing power for hospitals with back up generators and office building which don’t. The value of each of those 9’s to society and the overall economy is what matters and business being forced to shut down lose vastly more money than it would cost to prevent this issue.

The market based solution is to add a very large fine for blackouts on a per customer bases. Grid operators can still select how many actual 9’s they want, but the externalities for doing so are priced in.

They are relevant. The electrical utilities could load-shed based on priority, so that places that need highly reliable power pay more and get special guarantees. Technically infeasible on a house-by-house basis, but they could do it for hospitals and such. They probably already do.

Your solution will cause power prices to go up. I'm sure a lot of consumers would be happy with that trade, but why should the ones who are unhappy with it be dragged along for the ride? There is no need to force the grid to provide reliable power to people who won't pay for it.

I'm not sure that works because the operator can just go bankrupt in that situation?

This is a week about every 10 years best case, right now, where I’m at (near Austin). We lose water for twice that long every 5 years. The reliability is probably less than 99% for power, and 95% for water.

Fellow Austinite here. To what events are you referring? I have no recollection of multiday power or water outages in the last 10 years.

We had a boil water notice that lasted for a couple weeks after bad storms just a year or two ago, and now this one. I don’t think we’ve had power issues like this recently.

Do you live near a hospital? I have seen reported in some news articles that people who live near hospitals have been less affected.

thechao is probably referring to the 2011 outage - dunno if that was multi-day though