[bernb]

Living in Germany which is a relatively small country by size, it is stunning to hear about all those story about long going power outtakes. Never heard of that before.

Experienced a relatively large outage a few weeks ago. I think I had one every ten years or so. Happened at 8pm. Online monitoring system (Mobile Internet is able to run on backup power for a day) said it would be fixed by 11pm, but it was actually fixed at 9pm. I watched Netflix on my tablet for the time being.

Needles to say, there's no big market here for such generators.

[simoncion]

> ...it is stunning to hear about all those story about long going power outtakes.

Do remember that the ~2000 mile eastern section of the US is exposed to Atlantic hurricanes. Germany gets nothing like those. Additionally, US states exist in a large variety of climates, so the country as a whole has to deal with both freak heat and ice that Germany rarely faces.

Also remember that Germany is more densely populated and (until very recently) far richer than many of the US states that seem to be unable to plan for generally-uninterrupted power supply. Looking at the size and population of the various US states [0] might help put some of this into perspective.

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...>

[swiftcoder]

Folks here in Spain felt much the same way up until about 2 weeks ago. Quite a mild power cut by hurricane-zone standards, despite the wide area affected, but that still means a lot of folks having to be rescued from elevators, and so on