In our modern world, it’s easy to take certain things for granted. And one of the easiest things to take for
granted is the invisible force that powers virtually everything in your home: electricity. Since electricity has become such an integral part of everyday life, it’s easy not to think much about it —
until it becomes unavailable. A sudden loss of electricity, otherwise known as a power outage, can
negatively affect everything from working to cooking to being able to see at night.
The worldwide electricity power grid is robust in most populated areas, designed to withstand the
physical elements and human errors that can potentially shut down the system. While this works most of
the time, sometimes the system fails and the power goes out.
Get ready to learn everything you need to know about power outages, from how and where they most
often occur to what you can do to help mitigate their effects.
Power outages are what occur when electricity — particularly the electrical power network, or electrical
grid — is unavailable. There are many different causes for power outages, but the thing they all have in
common is that they affect whole areas or regions, not just a single home.
Why? Because the outage stems from the electricity supplier not within the home. If a home is without
power but the rest of the neighborhood is receiving electricity, there’s likely a circuit breaker issue or
some other household problems.
There are many causes for why power outages occur. However, the three most common causes are
natural causes, human error, and overload.
Basically, any interruption between power generation and the supply of electricity to homes can cause a
power outage. It can stem from inclement weather conditions, human error, equipment failure, and even
animal interference. Scheduled maintenance can also cause a power outage, though this is usually
communicated to households in advance by the utility company.
Most power outages don’t last very long, with many ending seconds or minutes after beginning.
However, sometimes outages can last a very long time, even several weeks.
Since some power outages are caused by lightning or violent wind storms, power lines can become
damaged and lead to long delays when restoring power. Extended outages impact entire communities
and can even affect the economy when power is unavailable to large areas of the population. For
example, the Northeast blackout of 2003 left 50 million people without power from New York to
Canada’s capital Ottawa.
A blackout is a complete loss of power to an area. This is the most severe type of power outage, typically
affecting large numbers of people over sometimes incredibly large areas. Blackouts usually result from
major damage to electrical generation facilities (such as structural damage from violent wind storms or
lightning strikes) and are particularly difficult to fix quickly — this is why these types of outages can last
for several weeks in the worst-case scenarios.
Brownouts typically occur if there is a drop in electrical voltage or a drop in the overall electrical power
supply. The term for these types of outages derives from the dimming that happens to lights when the
voltage sags. While brownouts do not cause a complete loss of power, they can cause poor equipment
performance, and some devices — such as hair dryers or electric ovens — may not operate with the
lowered voltage during one of these outages.
A permanent fault is a sudden loss of power typically caused by a power line fault. These are simple and
easy to deal with: once the fault is removed or repaired, power is automatically restored. This type of
outage typically doesn’t affect large areas as it tends to trip up lines that are further down the supply line
to homes. While larger blackouts and brownouts are caused by problems in the generation, this is
caused by problems in the supply mechanism, which are usually easy to find and simple to fix.
Rolling blackouts are much different from the other three as they are planned power outages. These are
usually implemented in areas with unstable grids or with infrastructure that cannot handle the
population it serves. Rolling blackouts can also be caused if there’s not enough fuel to run power at full
capacity, whether for the short term or long term.
Power outages are most likely to occur during storms, especially violent weather events that involve high
winds, scorching temperatures, or freezing rain. Certain outages, such as rolling blackouts and
brownouts, happen when there’s not enough power to run the grid. This can happen when renewables
are used without a backup generation source for when there is only intermittent power available. That
said, it is more likely happens to areas that lack the infrastructure to serve a highly-populated area.
With improving technology, power outages are becoming less frequent and not as lengthy as a
percentage of total consumer usage. However, by sheer numbers they are occurring more frequently
than ever before and sometimes they can still last for several days or even weeks, especially if natural
disasters strike.
If you experience a power outage, alert your electricity provider as soon as you can. Many providers are
now equipped with digital systems to automatically detect power outages, but some still rely on
customer notifications to find and deal with blackouts and other types of breakdowns in the electrical
supply.
