According to the university, the power outages were a consequence of the Edgewood Fire burning in San Mateo County.
"Due to yesterday’s fire in the Emerald Hills area, the main Stanford campus lost the power supplied by PG&E’s main transmission line to the campus. PG&E is providing a limited supply of power through a secondary line, but it falls far short of the normal needs of the campus," the university said in a statement.
"This limited supply is being used to maintain cooling for the hospital and other critical infrastructure on campus.
I live in New York City and pay some of the highest rates in the country for electricity, but over the past 10 years (including multiple hurricanes), I’ve had less than 10 minutes of downtime, and even that was only on one of three phases.
Pretty crazy it's already been 24 hours and it might go on for days, and hard not to feel this is a portent of more such disruptions to come as summers will keep getting higher and higher peak temperatures over the coming decades...
EVs, Heat Pumps, and Electric Stoves only put additional pressure on an antiquated grid.
Do you know that ~all of Palo Alto can be knocked offline by breaking one line? This line happens to be under the flight path at the airport in the baylands and it got hit by a plane before. Whole city, no power, whole day. In the intervening years was an auxiliary line into the city built? What do you suppose?
>Building spaces with the following characteristics: Significant safety concern, Non reproducible, reproducible (long duration), Non recoverable, Laser Labs and Wet Labs, MRI, High dollar, Long Duration, Campus Data Center/ECH.
That sounds bad.
[0] https://lbre.stanford.edu/sites/lbre-production/files/stanfo...
A problem with sustainability possibly? On various levels I'd say.
The Roman Empire fell and history will repeat itself. Not necessarily during our lifetime, but good news from the US seem to have become rare during the last 10-20 years.
