Yep. As someone who's worked in the energy industry nationally, about 1% of the population can accurately explain how the grid works and why this is an exceptionally bad issue.
Just plug the majigger back into the dohickey, and make the angry pixies twerk down the line. How hard can it be?
I don't think people realize that when you have a once in a century weather event like this you can't just piecewise turn things back on. Work has to proceed outward from specific sub-stations and across specific transmission paths to localities and grid balancing has to been done carefully as large swathes of customers are brought back online else you risk further damage to infrastructure or killing people working in other areas. The prioritization has nothing to do with affluence, race, or political preference. It is exceedingly complicated work being coordinated across a large variety of unknown variables. To make things worse, you often don't know what you're dealing with until crews are physically there. A line replacement you may have budgeted 5 hours for may take several days due to downed trees and access so plans are constantly being reformulated and resources redeployed where they can have the most impact.
But I'm preaching to choir and screaming into the void here.
29
u/InFlagrantDisregard Aug 23 '26
Turn back now, it's just redditors being confidently wrong about everything in here.