Comment by dghlsakjg a day ago
Gas stations are private businesses, and they typically make almost nothing on gas, most of their margin is in the c-store.
Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6 figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a decade event is pretty absurd.
> How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime?
Ready.gov has instructions.
> Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase?
oh, c'mon.
Do you or any one person you know use several hundred gallons of gas over the course of a few days on critical things? If that is the case, then yes, by all means you should have a private gasoline backup supply since you are running some sort of industrial scale operation.
If you are worried about it, just make sure you have a several day supply of gasoline on hand. For most people that use about a tank of gas per week that means filling up when you are at half tank. For those of us, like me, who live in a place where a generator is occasionally useful, a couple of jerry cans full of gas are typically already on hand. Hundreds of gallons could keep me powered up for weeks at a minimum unless I was really trying to use a lot of power.
For most people, gasoline is used exclusively for their car, which has a multi-day gas supply storage mechanism built in.
Lets say we require all gas stations to have the ability to pump gas during a blackout. Then what? It doesn't solve any of your hypotheticals. Without a beefy generator and a professional crossover switch, you aren't powering your home with gasoline. What is a working gas station going to do for a renter, or apartment dweller?
In any case. If things get actually desperate, it isn't that hard for a handy person to wire a generator up on the spot, and get gas pumping, although at that point, what are the chances that the payment network is online. At that point you can just run the pump by hand if it's truly desperate.
> Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?
Not absurd at all. Experts and the government actually suggest that people do some of their own preparations for disasters. They suggest that you have enough on hand to survive for 48 hours without outside help. There are entire government initiatives, campaigns and organizations based on this exact premise. Check out Ready.gov for the USA federal version. You can probably find state and local level initiatives where you are too, if in the US. Almost every large, multi-day, regional blackout in living memory is weather related, which also means it is predictable.
And gasoline is insanely easy to replace if you have a car that uses it. Drive to station when car is empty, dump oldest 5 gallon can of fuel into tank, finish filling tank, refill can. Do it every three months. No gas is more than a year old, half the time that stabilizers allow.
If disaster strikes, you never worry about the gas you have.
I guess a government/population that cared about resilience would require them to add a few pennies/gallon onto the price to pay for backup generators. Maybe also bigger storage tanks.
Pretty well known, and documented. You can google it, or do the math yourself. Typical margins are around 1-2% on fuel sales. You can check this by looking up the wholesale price of gas (search for 'gasoline rack price', that tells you what it costs at the distribution center), then add in taxes, and you will find that most stations are within a few cents of cost. Don't forget that gas pumps cost $20k per, and all of the fixed costs like tanks, testing, calibration, inspections, etc.
The business model for a typical gas station is to bring people in with competitively priced gas, since people are incredibly price sensitive to gas, and then make money with high margin c-store items. Most of the things in a c-store have triple digit margins. That's why you'll see plenty of c-stores without gas stations, but its pretty rare to see a gas station that doesn't have a business attached.
Movie theaters have a similar model. The movie gets you in the door, but it’s very low margin. They make almost all their profit on the concessions.
While I can count on one hand the number of times I walk into the store at a gas station in a given year, I know others who buy things on a daily basis, to the point that they’re on a first name basis with everyone there and the employees start asking questions if a few days go buy without a visit.
Government imposes all sorts of regulations on all sorts of businesses; prices rise to cover it. Any one individual gas station might not be able to sustain having an expensive generator, but if they all need one, and they all raise prices to cover it, it doesn't affect the competition much.
I had to get gas every day for my generator during the outages. Only one gas station in down was in an area that still had power. If you don’t live in so cal and have to deal with public safety power shutoffs, quit talking out of your ass. Our power grid is so unreliable here that they really need to make the gas infrastructure more resilient.
When shit goes down, people need to be able to get fuel. The populace at large is never going to be prepared enough to deal with every gas station in the area going down. Raise the cost of gas by 10 cents to cover the costs. If every station is mandated to do so then they won’t have any issues with the margins as they will simply all raise prices in concert.
I don't live in SoCal. I live in rural Canada where I get several power outages per year due to inclement weather downing lines.
It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas availability, in your case. You were able to get enough gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small enough areas that you could have just driven to a different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but hardly worth the effort of building independent power generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your state.
A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is maintained much better.
Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation, California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't regularly cause billion dollar fires.
You make a great point. Additionally, I know personally of one house fire that was caused by sparks from a power line falling on a stray gas can and lighting the whole place on fire. If you combine bad infrastructure with everyone storing a bunch of extra gas around the house, then that might actually increase fire risk significantly.
It’s also not something you really need to plan in advance. It’s ok if you can’t pump gasoline for a day. If there’s some catastrophic outage that takes down an entire region for days, you can hook up generators to the pumps at that point. There are plenty of portable generators out there. It’s not like a hospital where people will die if the power is out for more than a minute.
How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime? Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase? Or maybe we all invest in personal solar generation at our homes, with enough battery capacity to power an electric car and the home through those short winter days? This would cost tens of thousands of dollars for every household in the country. What about renters? Are they out of luck? Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?