What would you do if your business experienced a 20x increase in customer demand overnight? Would your systems hold? Would you still promise a 24-hour turnaround on solutions? Would your team have the capacity to manage a surge in incoming requests all at once, under pressure and with no advance notice? Now imagine that demand isn’t for convenience. It’s for safety, warmth and basic stability.
Nashville is in the middle of a devastating ice storm, and for many of us, the impact is deeply personal. My power is still out near Green Hills. My dad retired from NES. I’m a native Nashvillian, and I’m watching my city buckle under a crisis that should be forcing us to ask much bigger questions than when the lights are coming back on.
We have to ask the hard questions about these outages
Under normal conditions, Nashville Electric Service manages outages affecting roughly 10,000 customers at a time. Right now, they’re responding to outages impacting more than 200,000 customers simultaneously. That’s a 20× increase in demand, or a 1,900 percent surge overnight. NES officials have called this “the most severe outage NES has ever had.”
The truth is, most businesses would break under that kind of strain, not because of incompetence, but because no system is designed to absorb a 1,900 percent spike without stress…