It is absolutely a big miss, but it's in the context of long tail events (in the magnitude of the event severity), which California by its very nature experiences more than most other large population states: relentless storms, heat waves, wildfires.

Should California utilities be better at restoring power in these situations? Absolutely, and we shouldn't cut them much slack in that regard. But that doesn't mean it's a "3rd world country" situation with respect to power reliability like the GP described. The typical power problems faced in developing countries are daily power reliability problems that are due to poor grid management in normal conditions, not exceptional conditions.

I’m from a third world country, and now live in the Bay.

To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.

It’s absolutely third world country level when the weather is anything but exactly 70 degrees. You have zero idea what you’re talking about, the original guy is correct.

> I’m from a third world country, and now live in the Bay

Same here. I've sat in the sweltering tropical heat with nary a fan for relief, so I well understand what I'm talking about.

> To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.

In my Bay Area neighborhood there have been no outages for the last 3 years, but my individual anecdote is no more or less valid than yours when generalizing about California at large. It's a huge state with incredible variability in nearly every dimension.

Local conditions matter greatly. I'm in a dense urban environment, near hospitals and fire stations. That's probably why our power is more reliable. We have friends who live in wealthy wooded and hilly area of the Peninsula who have lost power for days this past winter, because those crazy storms made so many trees fall on power lines.

Your power problems sound highly localized, and you are right to be upset about it, but it's on your utility, not the overall grid.

You understand that Palo Alto et co are on different power grids to Atherton/LAH/MV etc right?

Highly localized across the entire bay for the atmospheric river a couple weeks ago.

Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

> You understand that Palo Alto et co are on different power grids to Atherton/LAH/MV etc right?

They are not on a different grid at all. Most of California, and definitely the entire Bay Area is part of the same grid managed by CAISO:

https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx

Palo Alto has its own municipal utility. There is a huge difference. A municipal utility is only responsible for retail electric sales and distribution infrastructure in a specific area. That includes local substations and power lines, which are the likely source of your electricity reliability problems.

Palo Alto doesn't manage supply and demand in real time, maintaining 60Hz AC, or run the wholesale electricity markets. CAISO does those, along with transmission and regional interconnects, all of which are functions of the electric grid. The meanings of words matter when discussing these things.

> Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Thank you for the pleasant feedback.

So when we refer to the weather induced disconnections, these are issues with things like trees on the lines and problems with our substations. These are principally managed by the utility, which you know is what I was referencing by “grid”.

What more would you like explained here?

Live with PG&E and live with PAU and then talk about it. Semantics are totally irrelevant.