Interesting report, Dax21. West of me, the area is served by APS, the biggest power co. in AZ, though there are a couple dozen companies. They have a policy of zero preventative maintenance; they only fix things that have caused an outage or complaints. No policing of lines for arcing on hardware on the poles/EMI sources, or anything else. Cables flailing in the wind from an old disconnected transformer just stay that way for years. They rush to fix things that break, and keep most of the many brief outages to under 4 hours (rarely 8hrs), but there may be 20 short outages a year.
I really enjoy not being hostage to a power co. I wish I'd gone off grid much earlier. Almost everyone I know who has says the same.