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> 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 eart
by yokoprime 8mo ago
> 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.
- colechristensen 8mo agoThose 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.
- nxpnsv 8mo agoWe have above ground power lines in the nordics too. They are just built to handle our climate.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- matttproud 8mo agoYeah, it was interesting to see some above-ground-to-the-premises power delivery in some of the smaller Norwegian villages above the arctic circle. Things looked rather robust, though. I lived in the Oklahoma and in Minnesota, and the difference there is already stark: * OK suffered from plenty of storm-induced winter power outages (massive freezing rain cycles were common in my life). My mother's cotton bath robe, which she kept using until late in her life, had burn marks from when she reached for something over a lit candle during a power outage when I was four years old. * MN suffers some, but people knew to develop meaningful contingency plans. Both states have variegated buried-power-to-the-premises usage. It's not really to be expected as the norm in either place, but MN has far more than OK (funnily enough I grew up in a place in OK with it). Either way, the infrastructure robustness in North America looks like it arose from a dismal cost-benefit analysis versus a societal welfare consideration. I left North America about 14 years ago for Europe. The difference is stark. We've only had one significant power interruption in that time (not even in winter); whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America. What really freaks me out about the situation in North America is just the poor insulation of the structures and their low thermal mass. They will get cold fast. Aside: A lot of friends and family in North America balked at the idea of getting a heat pump due to performance during a power outage: "when the power goes out, I can still run my gas." When I asked them whether the house was heated with forced air or used an electronic thermostatic switches, the snarky smile turned to a grimace. When you live in a cold place, you learn to do things differently. You're naive if you don't pack warm blankets and water in your vehicle, for instance. You never know when you might find yourself stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown …
- kalleboo 8mo ago> whereas stochastic neighborhood outages were commonplace in North America I believe this has to do with the design of the North American split phase vs European three-phase grid. The European grid has more centralized, larger neighborhood step-down transformers, whereas the US has many more decentralized smaller pole-mounted transformers. NA proponents say any given outage will affect fewer people, EU proponents say it's easier to maintain fewer pieces of infrastructure. (That said I live in Japan where we have a US-style grid and have only had like 2, <5 min outages during typhoons and nothing else so maybe it's just the quality of the maintenance)
- a_better_world 8mo agoor might find SOMEONE ELSE stranded somewhere due to vehicular breakdown. yes, obviously "put on your own oxygen mask before helping others" (so you remain an asset instead of a liability), but please remember the "helping others" part (so you remain an asset instead of a liability).
- MaulingMonkey 8mo agoWhere I live (pacific northwest), it's not snow that's the problem, but windstorms. Presumably knocking over trees, which in turn takes down power lines - which of course implies said trees are tall, in proximity to the power lines, and not cut down. I maybe average 24 hours of outage per year (frequently less, but occasionally spiking to a multi-day outage.) I don't think that's something that can be solved with just "build quality"... but it presumably could be solved through "maintainence" (cutting down or trimming trees, although that requires identifying the problem, permissions, a willingness to have decreased tree coverage, etc.)
- fuzztester 8mo agohow?
- mzi 8mo agoIn the Nordics it's very rare. There were power outages this year that lasted for more than 24h for some customers. So naturally there was a public inquiry into how the power companies let that happen.
- brabel 8mo agoIn Sweden it also almost never happens but this year there was a hurricane like storm that fell lots of trees and thousands of people had no power for days. But yeah it wasn’t because of snow.
- a96 8mo agoParts of Finland, too. Few people lost power for a long time. I didn't even notice. Depends on how many things break and where.
- phony-account 8mo ago> In Sweden it also almost never happens This just isn’t true, at all - electricity is regularly out for hundreds or thousands of people in Sweden because of snow. This year was especially bad, where thousands were without any electricity for up to 10 or 12 days, but every year brings the same problems. Just google “elavbrott snö” and you’ll find many current examples - just as one instance: https://www.horisontmagasin.se/2026/01/06/nya-elavbrott-nu-pa-grund-av-sno/ https://www.horisontmagasin.se/2026/01/06/nya-elavbrott-nu-p...
- watwut 8mo agoThat is bad infrastructure problem. Not a necessary feature. Near freezing should be non issue.
- LeafItAlone 8mo agoI lived in such a place and never had power outages. Mostly because the power company came through on a regular basis (two years or so) and chopped down and trees that could cause problems. Some areas definitely looked terrible from a beauty standpoint, but it meant keeping power.
- dlcarrier 8mo agoMy parents have underground power lines, and they've lost power multiple times, from vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The transformers are still above ground, in big green boxes, and occasionally someone will drive into one and knock out power. The substation is also above ground, and once they lost power because a mylar balloon landed in the substation and shorted some lines. They've also lost power from rolling blackouts due to not having enough power plants, but that's a California thing, at least compared to first-world countries. In a similar vein, a substation in the city my dad grew up in was once taken out by a sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
- benttoothpaste 8mo agoMy neighborhood has underground power lines and we lose power every time there is a hurricane/tropical storm or even a major thunderstorm.
- phil21 8mo agoUnderground power lines are weirdly vulnerable to lightning strikes. I lived through two >24hr power outages at my previous place that had buried power lines into the subdivision. Both due to lightning strikes on trees that happened to be close to the buried lines. The lightning then fed into the line, and you could literally see black scorch marks on the lawn that followed the wiring until it eventually dissipated. This required digging up 30-40ft of melted wiring each time and re-running it. These appeared to be direct-burial cables fwiw. Talking to the utility guys, it was pretty common for this to be the failure mode. I found it pretty interesting and somewhat ironic.
- westpfelia 8mo agoLive 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.
- fwsgonzo 8mo agoSame here, also on an island. We lost power for ~8 hours during a storm, however that is the longest I've ever experienced. I have this stone fireplace: https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ https://www.norskkleber.no/ovner/marcello/ (Marcello 140), which kept my 75sqm living room heated through the whole thing. Since that storm, we have decided to buy a second fireplace for upstairs with a cooking top.
- wasmainiac 8mo agoHey Vi burde alle chat litt. Vi bor jo alle litt i nærheten.
- fwsgonzo 8mo agoGjerne det! Sitter her om dagen: https://discord.gg/4e3yd5ej https://discord.gg/4e3yd5ej
- cwillu 8mo agoYeah, that's not a thing here in saskatchewan either.
- da_chicken 8mo agoI'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.
- coffeebeqn 8mo agoArticle 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
- throwaway290 8mo agoEven in deep Russia I don't think "power goes out with first winter storm" is a thing. and I thought russian infra sucked... That said I remember power could go out from a lightning storm or without any reason. But pretty rarely
- ansgri 8mo agoRussian infra doesn’t suck that much, I guess it was overbuilt in soviet times. Armenian, on the oner hand… But they’re “societally prepared” in the sense that repairs are quick usually, and there are even some upgrades recently.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo agoI had a Russian friend tell me that the Soviet mindset was to overbuild. He said they tended to build “two of everything,” which is why there’s so many sets of two. If one craps out, the second can be used in its place, or scavenged for parts.
- lisper 8mo agoI am in Honolulu right now and the power has gone out twice in the last three days because of high winds.
- inglor_cz 8mo agoOr somewhere remote. Czechia is a small country with a well-developed grid and nothing here is really "remote" compared to, say, Alaska. But people still do have chalets/huts in the mountains, and the authorities won't spend money on burying 10 km of cables in complicated terrain just for a small hut colony or a solitary hut. Which means that the cables go through the air, which means that a fallen tree can sever them, and you won't be particularly prioritized. That said, people who actually live there or spend longer holidays there during winter months, tend to have enough firewood collected to survive such situations comfortably. It is a different story in cities/villages with compact house patterns. I don't think I ever saw a snow-related blackout in such a place. There, your worst risk is actually flooding. We've had some serious floods in the last decades, and even buried cables will get damaged and short-circuited in such an event. For example, the cable needs to cross a stream, so it is attached to a bridge, high water comes and tears down the entire bridge with the cable as well.
- dboreham 8mo agoEven a backward country like the USA, our power has never gone out in the winter. Only in the summer due to lightning strikes.
- mannykannot 8mo agoI guess you probably don’t live in Texas, then!
- sgt 8mo agoA 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.
- eitland 8mo agoIt 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.
- b112 8mo agoLikely city vs rural.
- doubled112 8mo agoParts of Ottawa, Canada were without power for 10+ days after a windstorm in 2022. Not rural, but the suburbs. > Ottawa Hydro restored power to just over half its customers after one week https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2022_Canadian_derecho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2022_Canadian_derecho Fortunately, you can't freeze to death in May, and the roads are clear so you just go to where the power is.
- cess11 8mo agoIn 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.
- silcoon 8mo agoI 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).
- rgmerk 8mo agoWorth keeping in mind that nobody freezes to death in FNQ if the power goes out.
- theothertimcook 8mo ago"she'll be right" =/= "it's gonna be fine" More of a it's not going to be fine but we will deal with it. 1000+KMs away in/not far from the capital city of Queensland it's not unheard of to have a multi-day power outage after a severe storm. Considering QLD is almost 6x the size of Norway it's not actually that bad.
- DrBazza 8mo agoWe 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?
- thaumasiotes 8mo agohttps://satwcomic.com/you-re-hot-then-you-re-cold 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.)
- BrtByte 8mo agoSnow isn't inherently the villain; mediocre infrastructure is
- emeril 8mo agoNorway is probably one of the better managed countries on earth
- wasmainiac 8mo agoI like it, but your statement is an generalisation.
- jjtheblunt 8mo agogrowing up in chicagoland when it snowed blizzard level often with lots of accumulation (70s, 80s), the power never went off, to your point also.
- titzer 8mo agoLosing power is highly correlated with above-ground power lines. Who'd a thunk that.
- dd82 8mo agoand wildfires, see PG&E in CA. they're expecting to spend 10B burying lines in the mountains. New england is pretty much one big rock garden/shelf where you're not digging through soil in alot of places but rock ledges.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- boringg 8mo agoThis 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).
- citrin_ru 8mo agoA-frame houses are not efficient in terms of space inside and thermal properties (both because of low volume to surface ratio). It's sufficient to have 40-45° root pitch to avoid snow accumulation.
- boringg 8mo agoDepends what you are optimizing for -- roof collapse in a high snow load local or the level of efficiency for thermal properties. You can drive for high efficiency of your thermal properties but when your roof collapses those efficiencies are meaningless. Home design is a game of engineering tradeoffs with the occasional new technology to improve things or lower costs.
- UltraSane 8mo agoAn A-frame is a overkill solution to snow load when you can just make a shallower roof stronger.
- pastage 8mo agoTradition says that this is not true but honestly I have no real experience except I have done the calculation for our roof. According to our local building standards at 60⁰ you basically have zero snow load, I am not sure what angle a shallow angle roof is but 30⁰ is max load. 6kN/m² is a lot of extra strength.
- cheeseface 8mo ago
- ghc 8mo agoliving 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.
- ghaff 8mo agoLive in ex-urban MA and it’s not common but have had a couple of multi-day power outages in both winter and summer over the decades I’ve lived here. Don’t remember the details of the summer outage but the winter one was a massive ice storm.
- swiftcoder 8mo agoCouple of tail-ends of hurricanes in summer offlined a big chunk of Massachusetts when I was living there. Likely one of those?
- ghc 8mo agoSure, but that's not the same as losing power during the first snowstorm every year. The massive ice storm was back in 2010 IIRC.
- PyWoody 8mo agoOof, you just reminded me of the Ice Storm of '98. I can still hear all the trees just exploding. It was wild.
- mindslight 8mo agoThe major ice storm I remember might have been 2012 or 2013. There was also a different snow storm (maybe that was 2010?) at the end of October when all the leaves were still on the trees. My parents lost power for something like 6 days (so much damage the crews were swamped). I had been visiting them, and gtfo as the snow was falling, and never lost power 2 hours away. I think this comes back to the framing of the article, stated as universal truths when it's really just someone who was woefully unprepared for a snow storm and subsequent power outage. Life threatening and horribly inconvenient for them yes, but nowhere near a universal experience. Prepare a few days ahead getting groceries, gas, etc. Make sure firewood totes are full. It starts snowing. Do a little shovel work to keep fire fed, if power goes out (rare, but always possible of course) a little more shovel work to set up generator. Wait for snow to stop, clean up with snowblower/tractor/shovels/etc, taking a variable number of sessions depending on how much snow fell. The main lesson is "be prepared", not all the little things the author got surprised by due to a wholesale lack of preparation.
- cucumber3732842 8mo agoAs 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.
- nancyminusone 8mo agoRural-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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- pastage 8mo agoMight 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.
- mikestew 8mo agoI 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.
- Sharlin 8mo agoLiving 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.
- Maakuth 8mo agoSince the Tapani storm of 2011 there's been a massive undergrounding of the power grid, so much of the rural areas are now also quite safe from outages. But there are still a lot of the old type of grid left and the economics for undergrounding those are increasingly unfavorable. Perhaps grid connected batteries next to the transformers might soon be more economical for many of these areas. They could serve other functions beside backup power, after all.
- Sharlin 8mo agoYeah. That's partly why it feels so foreign to me that these blackouts would still affect tens of thousands of homes. The Tapani storm was such a divisive experience. In the city the only effect of the storm I remember was that the windows were ringing quite a bit that night. Otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.
- micromacrofoot 8mo agoThis 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.
- FuriouslyAdrift 8mo agoIndiana 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-on-the-brink/ https://www.powermag.com/the-transformer-crisis-an-industry-...
- bombcar 8mo agoIt’s not really a question of urban/rural but more a question of “buried transmission lines” or not. We have buried lines and have few if any power issues. richer town a bit over does not, and loses power once a winter or so.
- jabroni_salad 8mo agoUnfortunately that won't always save you. One of my clients spent a pretty long time unpowered because some creek bed froze (why did they bury thru a creek bed???). When I called for followup they advised me that the truck they sent to remediate had its hydraulics freeze so there was an additional delay.
- FuriouslyAdrift 8mo agoBuried cables are extemely expensive for urban areas (and dangerous over time). Downtown Indianapolis (like most city centers) has buried cables all over and we had exploding manholes for a few years as old main lines aged out[1]. If I remember correctly, buried lines in our area cost around $1 million per mile and they estimated something like $100 billion to do the whole city. It's also 10 times more expensive to repair when repairs are needed. That's why they use poles in less dense areas. [1] https://www.wthr.com/article/news/for-fourth-time-explosion-blows-out-manhole-cover/531-76e198c2-a9c2-4c7b-9c9f-13a958926688 https://www.wthr.com/article/news/for-fourth-time-explosion-...
- wasmainiac 8mo agoAlso 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.
- dathinab 8mo agoironically sometimes warmer winters are worse like if a typical winter is slightly but consistently below 0C then a warmer winter would have - more black ice - more ice rain - more snow melting and refreezing (so ice on roofs, ground or trees etc.) - wetter snow (so heavier) etc. Through where I live it is/was the opposite this year. Normally we have mostly above 0C degrees and rarely ice rain/black ice or similar. Also some way colder days (-10C and below) too cold to have much ice issues. This year for ~a month the temperature did non stop bounce between enough above 0 during the day to slightly melt things (but not fully) and below 0 at evening + cold ground to fully freeze any water produced by melting. So non stop icy walkways, streets etc. for nearly a month. During the last days before it got warmer some unmaintained walk way I passed by had 4cm of solid ice on it. At the same time it wasn't cold enough to do ice skating on lakes. It really wasn't a nice winter.
- dathinab 8mo agoIt'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).
- goalieca 8mo agoCanada here, and it's gone out in winter. Not normal during snow storm but very common during ice storms.