High winds in the area took out power to our neighborhood this morning. I was working at my computer and did not notice anything until I received a message from our battery backup system informing me of the outage. In our last house, we had a natural gas-powered generator, and it would take about half a minute to come online, making it very obvious when a blackout had occurred. It also tended to not want to start during extremely cold or windy conditions, those most likely to be present when the system was needed. This is now the 7th time the grid has gone down since we moved into the house and I have to confess to being happy every time it happens. Our backup system was fairly expensive and the more times it is pressed into service the better I feel about the investment.

Concord has its own electric utility (CMLP), and I have nothing but great things to say about its responsiveness and competence. They had the whole neighborhood back online within 90 minutes.