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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

As an anectdotal data point, I live in Poland (Warsaw) and I can't remember the last time I had a power interruption at my home. I don't use UPSs at all, and my NAS gets years of uptime, unless I decide to reboot it.

This gets much worse if you live in the countryside, for obvious reasons, and I would guess that the German average is mostly driven by countryside, not big cities.

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I had similar experience in the UK. Maybe 3-4 outages in the first nearly 30 years of my life. Moved to the states and even living in the outskirts of Seattle I used to get multiple outages in a year.

The funny thing is, every time people from not-the-states talk about how rare power outages are, americans feel this bizarre urge to defend their power companies and grids, coming up with incredibly contortions to explain why it's not even remotely possible to do power the same in the states as elsewhere in the world. One memorable conversation here on HN ended up with the poster, facing the fact that yes, even in countries with lower population density still manage to bury their power cables (because they were claiming people were too far apart), somehow decided that it was because the states didn't have the expertise or equipment for burying power cables. Apparently no one here has diggers, and things like sewage pipes and gas pipes just run over the surface.

When I lived in the Czech countryside, we used to have about one outage per year, and it was almost always a planned one, when the grid required maintenance or expansion/upgrade (new houses being built).

In the city, there is something like one outage per 4 years, usually due to an extreme thunderstorm or floods. And it usually lasts under 20 minutes.

Reliability of the grid is a major indicator of infrastructure quality and I am somewhat surprised by the fact that Americans tolerate so many outages and consider them somehow natural.

The typical German experience could be described as "every decades your street loses power for two hours at a time" (which comes out to about that average). As you say, it's worse in rural areas and better in urban areas, though maybe less extreme than in Poland. But power interruptions are typically short and highly localized. Nobody would even think of getting a generator in case the power goes out, and outside a server room nobody has an UPS

Ah, but a power outage is kind of fun. It is like a little bit of survivalism, but you know the power will be back fairly soon. There’s a whole ritual, fill the tub, get some candles, figure out how to keep the food cold.

Next you’ll tell me you don’t have snow days.

> Next you’ll tell me you don’t have snow days

well, actually… :-)

Anecdotally, everyone I know in the US who has a generator didn’t get it because of random power outages, but because of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and blizzards.

Don't those natural disasters get included one way or another into an outage calculation?

I suppose parts of the US have more exposure to those disasters than Germany btw.

At least in my area (NJ) we lose power around a week on a good year, approx 2 weeks out on a bad year. Outages usually caused by trees falling during thunderstorm/wind, sometimes snow, not hurricane. Oh and drunks slamming into poles. Everyone has generators or other forms of backup power in my area.

But problem in recent years was the dead ash trees from emerald ash borer, they took a few years to fully die and weaken but now they just collapse into lines on a good wind gust.

Localities that have their own utilities never go down (Madison, NJ), my area is covered by Firstenergy that cheaps out and keeps only a skeleton crew in NJ, so when stuff like the poles snap at end of my driveway it takes 3-4 days to send crews from texas or ohio to replace it.

> At least in my area (NJ) we lose power around a week on a good year, approx 2 weeks out on a bad year. Outages usually caused by trees falling during thunderstorm/wind, sometimes snow, not hurricane. Oh and drunks slamming into poles. Everyone has generators or other forms of backup power in my area.

I had no idea your basic infrastructure was so bad.

Why not demand buried cables? Trees can't fall on them, drunk drivers can't knock them down.

On the other hand, here in Europe I've never had any problems remotely so common and severe, not in any place I lived, even with overhead power lines, including the tiny remote (by local standards) Welsh hamlet: https://maps.app.goo.gl/AtGFM9C5xJ6GrMJz5?g_st=com.google.ma...

I'm not an American, but Australia has a comparable number of power outages. A big factor is cost, and population density is what causes cost to be a concern. The EU has a population density that's three times higher than the US; underground lines are three times more expensive than overhead.

Australia is of course ten times less dense than the US, comparable to Idaho, but we have a unique combination of moderately dense land in the east and south west plus shockingly sparse areas with little to no infrastructure at all.

This reminds me, I think the normal measures of population density aren't very helpful, but I'm not sure what to replace it with.

If Alaska seceded, almost nobody in the other states would feel the difference, but the population density would jump 15%: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28population+USA+-+...

(Or in reverse if Trump acquires Greenland — with no real change to people's experiences, the population density would go down 23%: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28population+USA+%2...)

Likewise Australia, the outback is about 70%-85%-ish of the country depending who I ask, with about 607k people in it, so if the Aboriginal Australians were to secede with it, the rest suddenly gets x3-x6 the population density with no actual change to their experiences.

I think what would be useful is a histogram of population densities, or for example a percentile based metric: population density covering 99/95% of population.

I'm thinking something like "From the average person's perspective, how many people are within 100m, 500m, 1km, 5km, 10km, and 50km?"

The questions that seem to matter, and for which population density is a proxy, are: how crowded does it feel, and how easy is it to get to the socioeconomic advantages of being near other people (infrastructure, commuting, shopping, community sports, faith buildings, pubs, etc.)?

Since europe uses almost exclusively underground power lines there are rarely outages due to weather.

Those sorts of natural disasters are happening over once a year in many metropolitan areas these days, including places where they used to be incredibly rare.

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