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.
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).
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).