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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> Still waiting for one of these people who rave about their heat pump system to actually rely on it full time without a backup.

Eh? Most new houses in Ireland have them these days (it's more or less the only way to meet the efficiency requirements). There's never a backup.

> Same thing for induction stoves.

Eh? Again, these are pretty standard these days, and why would you need a backup?

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Different geographies have different requirements. You're not likely to need to face a week or more of no power after an ice storm in -10'C in Ireland.

We don't have power outages after ice storms. Temperatures of -10°C are regularly in Scandinavia as well as in Austria, Swiss and Germany.

We are living in a developed world with working infrastructure.

Power outages happens only by accident like when an US helicopter tries weird landings: https://www-abendzeitung--muenchen-de.translate.goog/bayern/...

There are occassional outages. But the pylons are designed with icing in the mind and that does the difference. More outages are due to poorly trimmed trees falling on wires than ice itself. That usually affects only small area and can be fixed quickly.

Issue with the ice accretion is that when things get bad… they get very bad:

https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/01/05/canada-history-jan-5-199...

Or a crane barge not making it under the power lines overhead:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/hydro-one-downtown-po...

> We are living in a developed world with working infrastructure.

You're welcome, we bombed all your infrastructure into oblivion about 80 years ago, now it's all new! And also, your country is quite a lot denser than North America, so you can bury every single power cable (though you don't, obviously) and if you think -10C is cold, just wait until you see what much of North America experiences during the winter.

Sure, as I said, different geographies have different requirements.

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