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Comment by lillecarl | Hacker News Reader

If 3% of Sweden was without power it would be ground breaking news, a media shitstorm and remediations to not let it happen again.

We're further north so power is more essential to human life here, but 3% is a huge number to me when we're talking something as fundamental as electricity.

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Alaska, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Maine all get weather colder than Sweden. Other northern states hover at around Sweden-ish levels during winter, varying based on elevation and lake effect.

We just don't really give much of a shit about our people or infrastructure. So we all just make do. When my power goes out every winter, my furnace doesn't work, so I break out the portable propane heater, sleeping bag, extra blankets, winter gear. I keep telling myself I'll buy a generator, but the expense and complexity aren't really worth it for a few days. A bunch of my neighbors have wood stoves.

Power outages are pretty common at least where I have lived in America. It's not uncommon to lose power for 20-30 minutes and sometimes up to a few hours. Outages with storms are extremely common.

More rare act-of-god scenarios like the 2009 ice storm[1] left my family without power for 2 weeks. I'm sure there was some action taken, but I continued to lose power at that house at least 2-3 times a month easily.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2009_North_American_ic...

Compared to other countries, America has normalized a different level of deviancy. Perhaps 5 things are worse in America while 3 things are better when making a single country comparison. It's important to understand the tolerance and need for service varies. For example, single family homes without fireplaces and firewood storage areas and also lacking natural gas service and off-gridable power storage are completely reliant on grid electricity power for heat.

In Italy I think I had a single power outage in the last 10 years and it was planned ahead of time for maintenance work.

That's cool that you haven't been affected, but they happen frequently in Italy.

https://www.thelocal.it/20230719/blackouts-hit-italian-citie...

The article you posted reports about "hundreds of people in the dark for hours on end". That makes the news, compared to hundreds of thousands of customers in the dark in the US not making any sensation.

I posted it already in this discussion, but [1] shows a power outage once a year or more is typical in Italy.

People in France, South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom can go 5 or more years between power outages.

[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

I live in California and have had at least one power outage every year, usually lasting a few hours. Somehow we just got used to it, I think it's an example of normalization of deviance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

After the 2005 Cyclone Gudrun in Sweden (730,000 households without power) there was a huge push to make power and telecoms infrastructure more resilient by burying it underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Gudrun

I mean, here is pretty much 2% of Stockholm losing power a few days ago. Barely a blurb, and there wasn't even a good weather related reason for it. It was just an "accident"

https://ground.news/article/power-outages-in-stockholm-more-...

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