As you may know, I live in a rural area of New Zealand with a rather unreliable electricity supply. I made a previous blog post here about power issues that occurred in 2022, because I thought this deserved documenting. 2023 was another exciting year - so this post is a summary of what happened in 2023.
As you may also know, 2023 started with some fairly extreme weather for northern New Zealand. Specifically, massive floods in Auckland on the 27th of January, followed by Cyclone Gabrielle in mid February. During the floods, Ahuroa actually did not experience any power interruptions. However, during the cyclone, we experienced by far the longest outage in at least the last 15 years: 6 days, 15 hours and 9 minutes. Several other events during the year caused outages, including cold weather, further storms, and equipment failures. The full list is below.
From the above list, we can calculate an approximate percentage uptime of the power supply in Ahuroa. Spoiler alert: it's not good. Vector claim 99.9% plus for urban areas, in fact this page claims 99.98% for the network as a whole at the time of writing. Ours is a far cry from that. The total outage time was 180 hours and 2 minutes. There are 24*365 = 8760 hours in a year, so let's calculate the total reliability: (8760-180.033)/8760 = 97.94%. For comparison, 2022's number was 99.34% - the impact of the extreme weather and the big February outage is obvious, but we had a number of other outages adding to it and also contributing to the poor overall number. Honestly it's pretty shocking.
This isn't just about Ahuroa, it's about rural networks as a whole: outages are to be expected. During extreme weather events, rural areas can see outages of several weeks: back in February, others near us were less fortunate and had no power for two whole weeks. And in these events, even many urban areas can have multi-day outages. And this is all without any transmission-level outages or total grid failures, which could cause much larger outages. We live in a world where we depend on electrical supply for almost everything, and it pays to remember how easily it can all be wiped out by extreme weather events - which also appear to be increasing worldwide. This is what motivates engineers like myself to work on projects that provide alternative means of supply, such as self-generation from solar combined with battery storage.
None yet!
Display Name
Email (optional, not displayed)
Website (optional, displayed, include "https://")
Comment (up to 1000 characters)