We absolutely should acknowledge the causes of our infrastructure uptime differences and evaluate if it's actually worth it to match the uptime of a place that doesn't have the same challenges.
Like, sure, if we wanted to we could massively build our electrical infrastructure to absolutely never go down. Hurricanes, tornadoes, massive hail, earthquakes, whatever. We can build so much redundancy and extreme engineering tolerances. It might cost us $1+/kWh though. Is it worth it? No? So then there's some dollar amount where we'll allow some downtime and failures for cost savings.
So what if the power in my house goes down a few minutes a year. I'd much rather pay a lot less for a few minutes of downtime than pay a lot more just so...the lights don't go out for a few minutes every now and then?
I’d also point out that Germany has its share of wild weather, including floods and storms. And yet they keep their grid up a lot more reliably than the US.
Germany has some floods, but nothing like a hurricane or tornado. I only spent 2 years in Germany, but even a typical summer thunderstorm in the NE US seemed worse than in Germany.
If Japan had 1.2 minutes of outages a year would you say Germany had shit infrastructure? No because 12 minutes is great and not really worth improving on.
2 hours per year without power per year is probably fine. A year is a long time.
Like, sure, if we wanted to we could massively build our electrical infrastructure to absolutely never go down. Hurricanes, tornadoes, massive hail, earthquakes, whatever. We can build so much redundancy and extreme engineering tolerances. It might cost us $1+/kWh though. Is it worth it? No? So then there's some dollar amount where we'll allow some downtime and failures for cost savings.
So what if the power in my house goes down a few minutes a year. I'd much rather pay a lot less for a few minutes of downtime than pay a lot more just so...the lights don't go out for a few minutes every now and then?