That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.
It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.
Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.
Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.
And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this?
Why will the US allow this, eventually?
You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied.
That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd.
In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transactions up to 20,000kroner (~1700EUR): https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-rig...
I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.
Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.
The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.
This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.
Systems like electric grid, internal water management (anti-flood) shouldn't be lean, they should be antifragile.
What's even more annoying that we have solutions for a lot of those problems - in case of electric grids we have hydroelectric buffers, we have types of powerplants that are easier to shutdown and startup than coal, gas or wind/solar(which cannot be used for cold start at all).
The problem is that building any of this takes longer than one political term.
Of course not, they're optimising shareholder profit.
We've had substantial disruptions, but they've not been particularly irrecoverable or sustained.
The chips shortage has been difficult, but it's also been little more than an inconvenience when you look at it in terms of goods being available to consumers or whatever.
But I wonder from a reliability (or lack of cascading failures) point of view whether synchronous islands interconnected with DC interconnects is more robust than a large synchronous network?