[wklauss]

U.S. electricity customers averaged five and one-half hours of power interruptions in 2022

Source: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303

In 2023, German households experienced an average of 13.7 minutes of power outages.

Source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Power-supply-13-7-minutes-of-po...

Not sure if the metrics are 100% comparable (they seem to be?) but points to a huge difference in reliability.

[jillesvangurp]

My alarm clock (old school radio alarm clock with big red digits) is plugged in and resets to 00:00 when there's no power. I would notice even the smallest outage this way (unless it happens exactly at midnight and lasts less than a minute).

That has happened maybe twice over the last 16 years. In both cases the outages were a few minutes at best. I live in Berlin; power outages are extremely rare here.

That 13.7 minutes is not for all house holds. In the rare case an outage happen, the very limited amount of households affected by that would experience that duration on average. And lets face it if something knocks out a major power line, which does happen, that single incident might take a few hours to resolve and would probably drag that average way up. Which means that I expect the median outage duration is probably a lot lower than the average; in the order of seconds or minutes at best.

"The number of interruptions per customer in 2023 was 0.34, which means that each customer is only affected by a disruption once every three years on average."

That sounds more like it. I generally only adjust the time on my alarm clock when daylight saving requires me to; twice a year.

[ahartmetz]

Yes, super rare and short in Berlin. I'm originally from a rural area where overground high voltage lines between villages are common. There it's typically 1-2 hours of outage every 3-5 years or so. The local utility company has some truck-mounted generators to help out in smaller outages.

[jwr]

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.

[Twirrim]

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.

[wongarsu]

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

[MR4D]

Germany doesn’t have hurricanes or wildfires. Take those out and I’d bet the grids are much more comparable.

PGE has to de-energize lines to prevent fires. Hurricanes just blow them down.

[wklauss]

The links actually cover this, since EIA tracks major events in power disruptions and separates them in the graph. US network is still orders of magnitude worse than Germany.

[dylan604]

How many hurricanes did Germany have in 2023? How many tornadoes did Germany have in 2023?

Let's not think that weather has nothing to do with any of this. That would just be beyond insulting

[wongarsu]

If I read the provided source correctly, if you exclude those events the average US customer still has two hours of power outages per year. That's a lot better than five, but still nearly an order of magnitude worse than 13 minutes.

[stefan_]

Underground powerlines are the norm in Germany, hurricanes, tornadoes or not and their grid would still perform vastly better.