> In the first really heavy winter storm of the year, your power might go off. This is understandable

Having lived in Norway most of my 40+ years on this earth, I can with some confidence say that this is not an universal truth. I don’t think I’ve experienced any power interruption of over 1 hour in winter ever, and it’s been at least 5 years since the last time. Yes it snows here. A lot.

This article is a bit painful to read. It should be lessons from living in the remote wildnerness in winter. Pretty much all those problems are relative to rural infrastructure and poor home building. If you live in an area with heavy snow load you want an A-frame roof to de-load the roof (for example see: Tahoe, CA ~ 500-800" snow a year).

Article should be called Lessons you learn living in a place where it regularly snows but with terrible infrastructure and seemingly no societal preparedness for said regular snow

Also live in Norway, nord Trøndelag. Power went out 3 timeslast year, few times for days, but that was an unusual winter. This years it’s only gone out for a few hours.

Seems to be a maintenance issue, trees are not cleared well enough. Sambo said that the warmer winters make the trees more likely to fall over.

Indiana here. Power outages due to fallen tree limbs, frozen trees "exploding", ice accumulation on lines, etc. is fairly common.

It can take days to bring a grid back up after a major outage. The lead time to replace a city-sized transformer is nearly 4 years, now (ask Puerto Rico about that).

https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-...

It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.

I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.

We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.

The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.

Living in Finland, there's always news about tens of thousands of households being left without power for days after particularly heavy winter storms. It works as a reminder that yes, some people do still live in rural backwoods, their local electricity distribution depending on fragile wires suspended on wooden poles. Whereas living in a town of any size, blackouts caused by weather simply never happen.

Live in Nordland on a island. Lost power for about two and a half minutes on Christmas day. I dont even think anyone but me noticed since it was still early.

Even when I was living in the snowier parts of America we didnt lose power. I would say losing power is not a universal truth in the slightest.

It's pretty much a "countries with bad infrastructure" problem.

But it can happen anywhere, so you should be prepared anyway. Like I'm living in a city and had a surprise 5 day power outage this winter. And it's not a place with bad infrastructure I can't remember any noticeable power outage in the last 8+ years. But unusual shit happened and power was gone for days.

Luckily it wasn't too cold. But at the last night before power was returned it was 10C in my room. Not too bad if you are prepared, very much bad if you are not (as it was the last day I was kinda half prepared, that night did suck).

I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.

So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.

Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).

Might be all of that infrastructure paid by oil, on the other side of the border in a not that remote of an area (10people/km²). We have absolutely had power outages lasting several days.

A lot of people in Norway lose power though, once in a while. Depends where you are. Just a few months ago thousands of people outside of Bergen were without power.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere Midwest (where it snows plenty), and our electricity came from a rural co-op ("rural co-ops", because no one else is going to drag electrical wires out here, so we'll do it ourselves). We rarely lost power, the infrastructure where the TFA author lives just sucks.

Snow isn't inherently the villain; mediocre infrastructure is

Rural-ish Michigan here. It doesn't happen most years, and almost never in winter, but it can. It seems to happen a lot less than when I was a kid.

Regardless, "my power never goes out" isn't a great plan for what to do if your power goes out. Ask Texas, they once thought the same.

living in New England, I have also never heard of this and I don't think it's understandable at all. Trees are pruned around power lines for a reason.

Yeah, that's not a thing here in saskatchewan either.

As much as a bunch of people on HN want to attribute this to European superiority or tax rate or investment or whatever, it's not. It's just a willingness to maintain things and not let idiots with no real problems roadblock the process.

I live in a formerly industrial city in the US that gets serious snow every year and probably a multi foot storm every couple years. My power outages in the past decade consist of several seconds long blips and one 1hr outage at 8am on a national holiday when a transformer on my street went bang.

My extended family lives hundreds of miles away in the same state, in a lesser snow climate in a city within spitting distance of the same population and density. They have power outages out the wazoo because the utilities can't cut trees and can't update infrastructure without the towns acting as a roadblock at the behest of a bunch of Karens who don't wan't their decorative 100yo trees losing limb and don't want construction activity to maintain or improve anything (not just utilities, they're actually less burdened but burdened nonetheless) performed without intentionally prohibitive and expensive environmental study this and approval that and so of course less gets done proactively.

I'll leave assuming the demographic makeup of these cities and relative wealth levels up to the reader but I assure you it tracks stereotypes.

I've lived in Michigan for about the same length of time, and even with the terrible service our current power companies are providing the only time I've lost power for more than a few minutes during the winter has been after an ice storm.

growing up in chicagoland when it snowed blizzard level often with lots of accumulation (70s, 80s), the power never went off, to your point also.

Norway is probably one of the better managed countries on earth

https://satwcomic.com/you-re-hot-then-you-re-cold

Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.

This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.

(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)

We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.

How does that compare to Norway?

Those of us with above ground power lines especially not in cities experience power outages. Particularly when it's near freezing and there's significant ice accumulation.

This is largely true in places with above ground power lines, like the US. I happen to live in an area with buried lines and have never actually lost power due to snow.

In large parts of the nordic countries we have either killed off all the trees or dug down the cables, making power interruptions uncommon except when someone with an excavator cuts a line by mistake or bad maintenance leads to a fire or short.

In the population wise very small county here I live in Sweden we haven't come that far yet, so when the storms a while ago did their thing some people were without power for several days. Mine was out for some six hours or so. The forests around here look like "plukkepinn" and tore down many, many above ground power lines.

When I grew up in the late eighties, early nineties further south we had interruptions at every other thunderstorm and most regular storms. This is one reason why we had a wood stove and self-circulation for heating rather than a heat pump. Around the turn of the millenium they buried the power lines and since then my family there see almost no interruptions.

Even a backward country like the USA, our power has never gone out in the winter. Only in the summer due to lightning strikes.