A lot of this seems to deal with unreliable electricity infrastructure and effects thereof. Is it just normal in the US and people in warmer places don't mind so much, or does it somehow correlate with snow?

I live in the back woods of Canada. We get a lot of snow. Our electrical supply (we call it "hydro") can disappear for long periods of time. The usual suspects are:

1. Ice storms. 3 inches (8 cm) of ice build up on trees can cause them to either drop limbs or deadfall into wires. It can be spectacular to see. Sparky.

2. The first heavy snowfall of the year can cause problems because although trees are trimmed every few years, they can grow pretty fast and either arch over the wires or are now tall enough to deadfall on the wires. By the time the later heavy snowfalls have come the danger trees have already dangered. The worst trees for this are the pines and spruces (and hemlocks and cedars but don't tend to grow as tall) since their boughs catch the snow and their new wood is actually pretty weak.

3. Drivers losing control. Doing 20 over the posted limit and passing a plow while the roads are greasy and visibility poor often results in taking out one or more poles while converting yourself into a casualty.

One large factor here is not that it takes a crew long to restore the lines, it's that the problems tend to occur in many sports over a large geographic region. There are only so many crews on shift and more remote places can be forced to wait for days while the townies get services right away. Our power was off one spring for three weeks a few years back after a derecho passed through a strip about 100 miles long by 20 miles wide. I'm still burning the wood for heat.

So, yeah, it's normal. Doesn't matter how good your make your infrastructure, nature is harsher.

Rural areas are much more common in the US than in other countries and much more likely to lose power in a storm, due to the long lengths of power line needed and the lack of redundancy from being too sparse to have multiple feed-ins to the local substation.

It's not the cold that knocks out power, it's the wet and saturated ground and high winds knocking trees into the power lines.

I live on the metric side of the Atlantic. Winter means extra tension on wires, extra load on trees leading to higher risk of air lines broken. At the same time you have decreased number of man-hours in a day, decreased efficiency in those hours and difficulty reaching points of failure physically. This leads to high stress on maintenance in an event of a snowstorm. Depending how inclined your country is to vote for the MBA-style policies, there are chances your maintenance crews are already at near-capacity and therefore such an "adversary" event can easily lead to some a bit more remote areas left without electricity for a week at -20°C. Having A+++ house with photovoltaic cells will not help in that case.

I grew up in Canadian snowbelt (Great Lakes) and never lost power. If there is an ice storm - then we all freak out. I'm not saying it can't happen if a lot of snow falls and then there is wind but we lose power in summer more often from squirrels trying to nest in transformers. The biggest blackout I experienced was in Toronto in a summer heatwave.

Trees fall down due to combination of heavy snow and wind. They probably don't cut sufficiently around power lines. It is extra bad if the ground hasn't frozen properly yet.

In some places it may be cheaper to dig down the cable than facing storms.

I don't have enough data to generalize across the US, but I grew up in a cold, snowy state (Wisconsin) and we almost never lost power. It happened, but it was pretty rare. We did have a generator for such instances, but that was because we had a dairy farm and the cooling unit for the milk tank needed to be kept running even if utility power was down.

Snow and ice builds up on overhead powerlines. It can cause issues. States with tornados or hurricanes are more likely to build underground which avoids this. My location in SE Michigan is all overhead and, while we rarely lose power, I see tons of issues every ice storm that some unlucky few suffer through.

I live very near a hospital and suspect I branch off their higher-SLA lines so that may be a factor.

Warmer places that don't experience cold much absolutely suffer during a cold spell. Texas (with its independent grid) has been absolutely wrecked every time it gets too cold.

If you can't drive anywhere, chances are the people who fix electricity grids will struggle too. And snow storms can fuck with infrastructure..

Less of an issue in areas where people do get around no matter the snowfall tho.