Perth was hit by several storm fronts over the weekend. The second one knocked out the power for 20 hours with crews completely overwhelmed by the volume of failures.
The only thing working was water and gas which allowed us to cook and have showers. No heating and torches for light.
If we’re going to move to 100% electricity, and I think we must, we need to do better than power poles and fragile wire strung between them to distribute it.
For some reason we appear to have made local councils responsible for underground power deployment and there’s very little apparent in the way of converting existing suburbs, even though we rely on electricity more and more.
We need to fix that whilst moving away from gas.
Batteries do wonders for letting people keep on cooking. So does putting power lines underground.
