Less then 99% means not having a working fridge for 3-12 hours or more in 30c heat so there went all your perishable foods. It means no lights in the house will work. No cooling or heating of any kind. No computers. No phone. None of your other random applicances will work either. None of the stuff you use to navigate a city like street lights will be working. Of course it can be mitigate with a generator or an expensive battery bank with solar panels provided you don't have a large enough load. Of course solar panels only work during the day so if the outage lasted into the night then you better hope to have a large enough bank to power all your essential equipment.

Suffice to say, less then 99% available is pretty terrible. You should come down and talk to a South African.

It depends how that's distributed.

If we had one hour per day without power that would be about 95% availability. Most of us wouldn't even notice that if it happened in the middle of the night.

If we had 100% availability with an 18-day stretch without power that would be about 95% availability, but it would be hugely disruptive.

Why? I don’t agree that wouldn’t be at all acceptable.

And even > 90% would be very expensive to achieve in winter in much of Europe (of course there are alternatives to solar so it’s not such a huge issue)

Go to a country with just that and witness how stupidly wasteful it is to have an energy grid with regular outages. Everyone who can afford it has an expensive backup generator, batteries, etc. For industry, it's a disaster.

I live off-grid, with solar and LifePo4, but I'm not naive enough to think that would scale to an economy any time soon. And for the record, no below 99% availability should be seen as unacceptable.

Why would we do that? I'd rather pay more than this.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I envy your naivete. You are extremely optimistic about people and politics.