[Twirrim]

I had similar experience in the UK. Maybe 3-4 outages in the first nearly 30 years of my life. Moved to the states and even living in the outskirts of Seattle I used to get multiple outages in a year.

The funny thing is, every time people from not-the-states talk about how rare power outages are, americans feel this bizarre urge to defend their power companies and grids, coming up with incredibly contortions to explain why it's not even remotely possible to do power the same in the states as elsewhere in the world. One memorable conversation here on HN ended up with the poster, facing the fact that yes, even in countries with lower population density still manage to bury their power cables (because they were claiming people were too far apart), somehow decided that it was because the states didn't have the expertise or equipment for burying power cables. Apparently no one here has diggers, and things like sewage pipes and gas pipes just run over the surface.

[inglor_cz]

When I lived in the Czech countryside, we used to have about one outage per year, and it was almost always a planned one, when the grid required maintenance or expansion/upgrade (new houses being built).

In the city, there is something like one outage per 4 years, usually due to an extreme thunderstorm or floods. And it usually lasts under 20 minutes.

Reliability of the grid is a major indicator of infrastructure quality and I am somewhat surprised by the fact that Americans tolerate so many outages and consider them somehow natural.