Go where? Chances are there’s quite a few km of power lines in sometimes badly reachable places to inspect.

Also, given that the interruptions were intermittent, it wouldn’t just be a matter of checking the power lines once.

I also don’t rule out they have fairly good stats on causes of intermittent short power interruptions, and looked at more likely causes first.

I don’t think there is enough info in this article to put blame this way.

It's true it might be inaccessible and that they have telemetry. But if the issue is recurring and you find no solution in the data you gotta walk the line. In fact this time it was the solution but ill grant you its an unlikely event. So you are both right? In medicine you always ALWAYS perform visual inspection of the site no matter how sure you are.

I live in rural Scotland and we had a mild problem with our electricity supply - our lights were flickering slightly, nobody else noticed but it was really annoying me.

I contacted the electricity supplier and they had a team come out within 24 hours - which rather surprised me. Turns out there was arcing at a junction box in the supply outside of our property which they fixed pretty quickly - presumably they react to things like that promptly due to potential fire risks.

Most utilities are very responsive to customer complaints in my experience. It's often the only signal they have of something being wrong short of a fuse breaking and completely dropping the power. If you don't have smart meters giving real time data there's no way to know about this.

We've had two attempts to have a smart meter installed - each time they come round, check the mobile phone signal strength and go away again....

Utilities do expect their equipment in the field every several years, including physical measurements of things like poles. As well as checking power lines for foliage interfering with the conductors. They will also go out and check things in response to complaints. But this is a hard one. If you go out and there's no birds, you haven't learned anything. You're probably going to suspect it's something weird with the transformers or something.

This article says “There's been several unexplained outages around dusk in recent weeks”.

If that’s Althea had, I think a few weeks is a decent time frame for debugging this. Chances are there were days in which nothing happened, and it can’t have been evident soon that the “around dusk” part was significant.

If a short happens on the line in theory if they can measure the amount current they can figure out the resistance and how far down the line to go.

Most distribution setups are in series. If a line faults, it's gonna travel upstream, kill the fuse, and then drop power for everyone downstream. There's nothing on those lines measuring power aside from the meters at the end customers.