For once I understand where the LARPerfag is coming from but I'm happy to see a thread dealing with my industry/work where my the men in my family have worked for 3 generations. If you'll allow my autism...
>How do neighborhood power outages work exactly? Every time it rains a little or the wind blows, it seems power goes out for my entire region.
This will vary from region to region but a little rain/wind shouldn't cause these issues. I suspect as other users have pointed out that your local co-opt is cutting costs by not trimming trees or allowing the lines to degrade and only replacing things when they break. I'm not a lineman so I'm not familiar with them that much beyond the simple stuff so excuse the lack of details. Basically, there are several factors on the lines that can cause them to trip/fail. The main one is trees and generally ice build up on those trees although sometimes equipment fails. Transformers blow sky high, people shoot at them with rifles, shit happens.
Generally, when the power trips in your home we will attempt to get it going again. Have you ever noticed that after it goes out it'll sometimes come back on 2-3 times before staying off for many hours/days? That's us attempting to restore service and hoping there was just a random occurrence on the line that caused it to trip. It's like a circuit breaker in your house that trips every now and again and you simply fix by restoring it to the on position. Most of the time this will fix the problem. If it doesn't work after 3 attempts we know we have major issues on the lines themselves and have to send a lineman out to check things before restoring power to the area. We also have to cut power to the area (and maybe other areas) so they can work safely.
Now here comes the part that pisses people off and why I can never answer friends and family when they ask when the power is coming back on. Lineman are independent contractors and don't work for your co-opt/power company. Generally, they stay in their local area when possible but they're always on-call to go where they are needed. For example, last summer in our local area we had what was left over of a major hurricane come through the area and lines were down everywhere. It took many days and in some places up to a week and a half to get the power restored. There were no linemen in the local area at the time because they were all 4-6 states away repairing damage from a hurricane two weeks before and the rest of them had just left town days before for the coast 2 states away in preparation to repair the damage from the hurricane coming in that week. No one expected the storm to carry so much energy so far in-land so we were basically fucked and were waiting up to a week in some places for those lineman to slowly work their way in-land to us. Those guys were sleeping in their trucks for months working 16+ hour shifts to get power restored over multiple states.
I hope that was helpful.
>Hydro, tidal, wind, etc are all cleaner than nuclear.
You'd be surprised. They don't contribute much to the overall grid.
>You can say it's cleaner than oil or coal though, but those are pretty much the worst.
Again, you'd be surprised how "clean" we've managed to get coal and natural gas plants in the last 20 years. I've worked both, mostly coal, and there is nothing but steam coming out of the smoke stacks these days. We filter out all the bad stuff and sell off the by-products. I'm not saying it's 100% clean but things have improved a lot in the last 10-15 years.
I've also worked in nuclear plants. All of them are very old now (70s and older) because no one is allowed to build new ones anymore. We do what we can to keep them going. I've never felt unsafe in one of them and they're inspected very very often. They come around and write $250+ tickets for unlit exit signs and such. My father once spent a week looking for a nut he dropped while working over a reactor and then did hours of paperwork in triplicate to document the fact that he'd looked everywhere and was 100% sure it didn't fall into the reactor itself. Things are very strict in those plants since 3 mile island happened.
I will say we should be going nuclear instead of converting so many coal plants over to natural gas. I'm anti-fracking for sure. I feel like nuclear is better than pumping chemicals into the ground with no idea of what the long term effects will be. At least with nuclear we know what we're getting. We'd also be a lot better off if they'd let us build new nuclear plants instead of constantly retro-fitting and keeping old plants going long beyond the time spans they were designed for.