Except the community is hosted by Discourse and thus doesn’t necessarily use Cachefly. Looks like Discourse has their own CDN via AWS.
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That sucks. I am sorry to hear that. 
It goes to show how poor our country’s infrastructure is! I wonder if Paul Thurrott is sitting there going “Leo! Leo! Hello! Anybody?”
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That would be quite the work out! lol
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Finally, a use for Leo’s Peloton!
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Hopefully everyone stays safe and you’re up and running soon.
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So true! You just can’t keep ignoring the evidences out there. Really puzzled by the naysayers on climate change. Is it just pure ignorance or indifference. Or it hasn’t really affected them yet in a meaningful way? 
But be safe, and I think we can be patient till everything is back to normal.
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If these kind of outages continue, will this spur businesses to invest more in their own local power solutions like solar/battery? I’ve often wondered about installing a shadow electrical system for emergencies as an alternative to a generator.
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@cousinofjah, I think that will depend on how well the electric companies handle it. Here in Florida, Florida Power & Light sets up all kinds of obstacles on the road to getting and using your own solar power. In some cases they make the user maintain a large insurance policy in case the panels somehow damage the grid. And then it can take up to two months before they get around to inspecting and approving the panels. And during major outages like after a hurricane they don’t allow anyone to use their panels. There was a good article about this in the NYT back in July. Hopefully you can see it if you’re interested.
Florida’s Utilities Keep Homeowners From Making the Most of Solar Power
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sounds like a great triangulation topic to explore, how to become self-sufficient or energy independent with addhoc backup solutions.
If you can spend an arm and a leg there are some nice projects out there based on solar and hydrogenics. the main problem is the storage part and making it all more efficient in terms of costs and watts, not to mention to be eco friendly.
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Ah! I was wondering where the usual TWiT shows went. I heard about the power outages in California, but I didn’t put 2 and 2 together. 
Well, good luck to everyone out there. Let’s hope this doesn’t become an ongoing problem. 
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Your power problem is not climate change related, if P&G keep the power line in better conditions they would not have to cut the power. Here in AZ APS and SRP have never had a power line cause a fire.
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Aha, that seems to make some sense. The official TWIT note and the weather forecast posted above left me thinking “huh?” No really strong winds, only 60mph and what has electricity to do with wildfires?
The lack of maintenance makes some sense of that.
We regularly have 70-80mph storms (typical autumn and winter storm conditions around here) and the odd hurricane (100mph+) and the power company never cuts power, unless a tree actually brings a line down in an area. I’ve never heard of them pre-emptively turning off power, here in Germany or in the UK, where I grew up. We had strikes in the 70s, where the workers turned off the power every night in protest of poor working conditions, but apart from that, I’ve never heard of a wide area power outage that was announced ahead of time. Local sub-stations or transformers blowing can happen, but that usually means an hours outage, until they can re-route.
I can’t actually remember the last time I experienced a power-outage. Probably a bad transformer, when I lived in the UK, back in the 90s. Even during the hurricanes of '87 and '89, we didn’t have any power outages…
This makes the PG&E network sound very primitive and in incredibly poor condition if they need to take it down due to such low wind conditions. I hope that California can get them sorted out and get them investing properly in infrastructure. Given California’s history with wildfires, it seems incredible that a utility could be allowed to get into such a dangerous state.
My best wishes to Leo and all the folks at TWIT. I hope you come through this unscathed.
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We have regular storms that are much stronger than those reported on this thread and we don’t usually have power outages - or if there are, it is usually due to a tree falling on a line and taking localised power out; it usually gets re-routed within an hour, unless it is very rural, in which case they have to wait for the workers to remove the tree from the line and re-connect the cable.
I would save we get around a dozen storms over 60mph per year and I can’t remember the last time we had an outage. Even when we get a hurricane (winds in excess of 100mph), we don’t lose power and I’ve never heard of power being cut off in advance.
There can be times when a particular segment needs maintenance, but most of the network here has redundancy, so they can plan the maintenance and, generally route around the segment being repaired - unless it happens to be the “last mile” to a particular road, for example.
So, no, nothing to do with climate change, everything to do with shoddy maintenance and corner cutting.
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What has this got to do with climate change? We are only talking about 60-65mph winds, which is fairly mild for a storm around here. and that doesn’t affect power supply.
While climate change is real, this current situation is more about the poor standards of the grid in California.
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From what I’ve been reading it sounds like the exceptional dryness of the air in the region has increased the risk, along with extended lack of rain turning vegetation to tinder. NWS Bay Area tweeted today that the dewpoint at Sonoma County Airport earlier was -9F. Apparently negative dewpoint is very rare for the area and indicates exceptionally dry air. I have no expertise in this area, but I think that the temperatures, lack of rain and exceptional dryness of the air are being connected to changes in the climate by many commenters.
Moving away from climate for a moment, the other reason for this caution that I’ve seen given is that wind gusts of 60-65mph are enough for the cables of PG&E transmission lines to touch: if they are powered, this will cause them to throw off showers of sparks, which are guaranteed to start a fire in the current conditions. A quick search online suggests that PG&E power plants may be a long way from the communities they serve, which means the long-distance transmission lines in Northern California are run through the mountains and valleys that have the highest forecast winds, and I believe it’s these long-distance lines which are going to need inspecting when the winds drop. I haven’t seen any pictures of big steel tower transmission lines of the type that are common in Europe and keep the cables far apart: all the lines pictured in the California press, even in remote locations, have been of the “wood-pole-and-crossbar” type where the cables are only a few feet apart. If that is truly what’s used everywhere, then it’s essentially 1920’s technology which isn’t really suitable for today’s conditions.
If anyone has better information than my surmises above, I’d be happy to be corrected.
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Hi Clayton,
I understand the first part. And that is very much climate/climate change related, but that shouldn’t affect/be affected by power distribution. We had a very dry summer and high winds (~70mph) over the summer and there were a lot of forest fires, but the electric companies didn’t turn off the grid.
That PG&E have such a poor grid and haven’t maintained it is the real problem here. Our grid stretches from the Nordic countries in the North down to Portugal and Spain in the South and West and the power stations are also very spread out, so lots of long distance lines. But they are well designed and well maintained and don’t cause these sorts of problems.
Both of the issues are very real, but I feel excusing PG&E’s laissez-fair attitude to safety with climate change deflects the spotlight from the real issue.
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Ah, forgive me, I was only reporting what I’d seen on Twitter threads following PG&E tweets. There were so many people saying things like “only a few days notice” that I took them at face value.
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Totally agree. I don’t have local knowledge, but if the network really is all wood-pole then it is way out of date and (worse) will take a long time and a lot of money to improve. If it’s actually better than I surmised from the available info then I apologise for that sweeping statement.
I think the other reason for all this caution (apart from “so we can’t be sued” on PG&E’s part) is that the areas with the highest forecast winds are all pretty remote and could take a long time to get firefighters to.
I was going by this map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_California for the power plant locations, which is why I thought that the supply for Petaluma might be coming in over long-distance lines through largely uninhabited areas.
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My comment was in relation to Leo’s comment about climate change. 