{"id":36642,"date":"2026-09-16T19:45:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T23:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=36642"},"modified":"2026-09-17T07:44:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T11:44:01","slug":"power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2026\/09\/power\/","title":{"rendered":"Power Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

For once, we received advance<\/em> notice of an approximately six-hour power outage in our area, starting Thursday around noon.\u00a0 This is a planned outage by our utility provider, Duke Energy.\u00a0 While they didn’t give a reason, I surmise it has something to do with connecting a recently-built solar-battery plant to our electrical grid.<\/p>\r\n

Six hours isn’t trivial in terms of impact on households.\u00a0 Those who don’t have generators will have to go to the supermarket and buy ice (if not ice chests) to keep their frozen items from spoiling.\u00a0 While we — who belatedly installed a whole-house generator six months after Helene blew through in 2024 — will, after a momentary bump, noisily ride it out.<\/p>\r\n

I keep saying to myself that we should have installed a generator years ago, being that we would lose power several times a year, for an hour or two, sometimes five or six, you could never predict.\u00a0 And this was with underground utilities in our neighborhood.<\/p>\r\n

I would like to blame the black bears in the area for chewing on our power lines, but they prefer lower-voltage targets, like birdhouses.\u00a0 The bears knocked over and tore apart our first bluebird house<\/a> back in May and decided to destroy the other one last week.\u00a0 So much for bluebirds.<\/p>\r\n

Bears don’t give advance notice, they just show up, do whatever they want and then leave.\u00a0 At least Duke Energy gave advance notice, this time.<\/p>\r\n

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For once, we received advance notice of an approximately six-hour power outage in our area, starting Thursday around noon.\u00a0 This is a planned outage by our utility provider, Duke Energy.\u00a0 While they didn’t give a reason, I surmise it has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36642"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36648,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36642\/revisions\/36648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}