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.