I sat last night and looked briefly at a Focus article, which covered a rare topic of 'blackouts'. So the discussion here...is the German electrical grid on shaky ground?
Off and on, since 1978, I've been in Germany. When you bring up the electrical outages....I just can't recall blackouts lasting much beyond one to two hours (at least where I've lived). Focus does bring up the Münsterland outage (2005), which went on for days and shocked a lot of people in the region.
There in the 1990s, I can remember one single occasion where the power went off for about eight hours, but that was the worst situation.
Why bring any of this up? Well....the German grid is under a evolution, where coal and nuke power are being cut and dissolved away. Some power experts expect a more unreliable state of electricity over the next twenty-odd years. The fact that electrical consumption increases almost yearly? Well, that feeds into this discussion as well.
Would I worry about a blackout in the summer period? No. The stuff in the refrigerator would be OK for a twenty-four blackout and no one would really suffer (other than zero power for your ventilator pumping air around the room).
Would I worry about a blackout in the winter period? Oh yeah. The natural gas system in the basement needs power to operate and pump water around the radiators. A six-to-twelve hour blackout wouldn't be awful but if you were talking twenty-four to forty-eight hours? It'd get awful chilly. Alternate generators? You just don't find Germans with these unless you are dealing with craftsmen who keep them for work-projects.
So in the midst of this hyped-up Covid worries....just another topic to worry about.
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