It's very local here. I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in one of the highest income counties in the state, two blocks from a major hospital, one block from a suburban downtown. Despite that, I've experienced one or two 4-6 hour long power outages per year the past few years. (Mostly correlated with weather.) One outage in June 2025 was 50 hours long!

Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.

Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.

Sadly one of those countries is the United States.

Here in Colorado they've started pre-emptively shutting off power during wind storms when it's hot and dry because there have been multiple instances of wind blowing down power lines which then start big fires. We had one instance in December where the power was out 2-3 days for tens of thousands of people, and over a week for some people.

Of course the problem is that nobody wants to pay to bury the lines. They'd need all new equipment for digging, to retrain all of the technicians, and get permission from a million different entities to dig up their land. We're effectively locked in to overhead cables.

> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time...

Here in SE Michigan (USA) I have quite a few friends who've totaled more than 15 days without power in the past couple years. Most of that in multi-day outages.

I'm on a decent power co-op that keeps the lines clear and has a fleet of trucks ready to roll before storms, but it still goes out when some drunk fool takes a run at a power pole or when lightning hits the right spot. And then there's the wind. Good management can only do so much.

Outages only last 1-4 hours at most though, so a LED lamp plugged in to a UPS is more than enough.

On an island, in a rainforest with regular storms. The power goes out multiple times a year due to trees falling on power lines. We also don't have municipal gas lines piped everywhere. Delivery only. If you have a leak they won't deliver until its fixed.

In the central USA my power is out up to 3 or 4 times a year for an hour or more, and momentarily maybe once every month or two. It's due to our power distribution being mostly overhead lines which are vulnerable to falling trees, squirrels, ice accumulation, storm and wind damage, etc. Even though my neighborhood has buried lines, that's just the last mile. The incoming power is all overhead lines.

North America generally has more extreme weather (everything from tornadoes to hurricanes and usually a much larger temperature range) and more above-ground electrical distribution than Europe.

I live in downtown Toronto and we get ice rain that occasionally knocks out power in portions of the city, though I live downtown where most of the lines are buried and I'm on the same electrical sub-block as several hospitals. The last time I lost power was the massive North American blackout of 2003.

> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).

I guess you don't live in Berlin.