[eisa01]

Does American utilities not pay any compensation for power outages?

My local utility pays 50 EUR starting 12 hours after the start of an outage, and 4 EUR/hr after that. So a 2 day outage would pay out 200 EUR, and it all happens automatically.

There's no exceptions to this (only if you are at fault...), and this gets subtracted from their regulated revenues such that it hits the bottom line.

Naturally, most low voltage distribution lines are buried under ground

[mackatsol]

Not in Canada.. and this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. Mind you here we have a much much larger country to cover in infrastructure , so it’s cheaper to run above ground.

[hoorible]

Worth mentioning that I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life and I don’t remember a utilities outage lasting as long as 1/2 a day, so not sure a payout after that length of time would make sense anyways.

Our neighbourhood had an outage last winter during the -40 cold snap, and we were definitely at risk of water pipes freezing (gas fireplace was on, but without circulation it didn’t matter). The potential structural damage repair costs from outages up here would be insane, which makes me wonder if that’s part of why our grid seems so reliable (compared to other countries, anecdotally).

[NavinF]

When we complain about power outages, we're usually talking about 1 hour outages that happen every few years, not 12 hour outages.

[mtrower]

Where I'm at (Madison, WI), it's more like multiple times per year. This is a capitol city.

Recently, I stayed for three months on a mountain in Virginia. We lost power at least 6 times, usually for multiple hours. Once it was out half the day. There's a good reason the proprietor there keeps a backup generator on automatic failover.