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Comment by martinsnow | Hacker News Reader

This is a lot isn't it?

Not really, 100k homes in Georgia is roughly 3% of homes.

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.

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-...

If power to 3% of the population was lost around here, it would be considered a heads-will-roll catastrophe.

If I understand right, the largest power failure in the UK (not counting the coal miner strikes) was the 1987 storm, and that didn't reach 3% in the UK*, more like 1.15%. I can't find exact figures for the percentage affected by the 2006 European blackout, but assuming the region boundaries and population hasn't shifted too much since then, that was also a bit less than 3%.

* nor did it reach 3% in France, which was affected worse; but a quick search didn't give me a list of French power failures to compare sizes of.

Remember that 3% of Georgia is not 3% of the entire U.S.

And? 3% of the UK isn't 3% of Europe.

Georgia is big enough that percentages is the right measure. If this had been Rhode Island or Hawaii then law of large numbers no longer applies and correlation of failures means that seeing even 30% affected isn't crazy. But Georgia is 11 million people, doesn't get that excuse, 3% is still a lot.

You said that the 1987 outage didn't reach 3% of the UK. The 2025 outage in Georgia didn't reach 3% of the US, either. You compared a state with a major power outage to multiple countries, as though it were a meaningful comparison—I don't see how it is.

US states may not be sovreign like EU states are, but they're similar in a lot of other ways.

Agreed. On that note London is also big enough that percentages are the right measure. Here is 7% of London being knocked out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_London_blackout

Cool. 100% of Italy lost power in 2003. That's over 50 million people.

Resulting in a major investigation, whose conclusions were acted upon to try to ensure it didn't happen again.

If you sit on your backside and say "eh, not too bad, these things happen", then you normalise failure, and things keep getting worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

100,000 is a lot of homes... they say there are a lot of people on earth today but it's only 6-7% of the total of people who ever lived :)

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