I see a lot of replies, but no one seems to have the answer. When they first put in the Chinese power plant out of town I drove out and followed the power leg that goes to Snookyville. Having worked with power up to 440v 60cycle I thought that the power line leading to Snookyville was on the small side.
One neighbor of mine heard a rumor that the industrial park outside of Snooky needs a lot of power and when all the factories are in full swing they get priority, but this wouldn't explain the 5min to two/three hour outages.

BTW/ I have A 3000watt gen set, but its just a pain to wheel it out and I don't run it after 10pm as my neighborhood is very quiet.

Why wouldn't the story re factories explain the long outages?

Rolling blackouts, divert energy to factories, simple, I imagine.

Factory consumption of power would explain the longer outages, but having worked with electricity and power generators, the shorter outages would be an inability or just being too lazy to phase two different power sources so you take the on-line one off line and then bring second source on-line to take the load.