To be fair, here in Québec I lost power for 4 days not even 3 weeks ago. So did 1 million people in Montréal (!). The only reason it wasn't catastrophic was that the weather was exceptionally merciful (if we ignore the freezing rains that caused the outages in the first place). We used our wood stove a lot (not legal in Montreal itself but still is in most areas around it) even with warmer temperatures and the stove honestly saved our Ramadan meals lol.

I guess it depends on where you live! But to me it's certainly iffy to ask people to just be ok with being helpless if unpredictable stuff happens.

Two decades and a half ago, the Quebec grid was completely fubar* for the most part of January due to freezing rains too so it's not super uncommon.

*worse than Texas 2 years ago as the electricity infrastructure physically collapsed, literally.

I get the argument, but to me it seems overly myopic. Our current electrical grid isn't alien technology we're just stuck with. If it's so bad we can't realistically rely on it to heat our homes or cook our food, maybe we should work on making it better, and in the process have all the other benefits of a reliable grid. The recent Texas outage is a perfect example. It was incredibly rare weather, but my understanding is that a lot of the problems could have been significantly mitigated with some investment in improving infrastructure. Again totally understand the concern, but having to keep gas around forever because we can't be bothered to fix our grid seems like not a great long-term solution compared to fixing the underlying issue.

I mean... it's a power outage, those happen and sometimes last a long time.

In my country, we had a strange mix of humid air hitting a cold air front, so one side of the country had rain, the other had snowfall, and in between you had frozen rain...

The result? This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Gr_RKN4Os (ignore the weird music).

This is what the power lines looked like: https://www.postojna.si/Datoteke/Slike/Novice/123958/l_12395...

Was it a problem? Sure. But not a huge once, since everyone in the rural area was familiar with power issues even from the yugoslav era, wood furnaces are still common, even in houses with central heating (most nowadays), and well.. the country of ~2mio pop. has ~162k voulonteer firefighters, and fallen trees were removed, roads were cleared, and due to a lot of shitty wood, the toilet paper was cheap :)

Now we're looking at this (article here), and germany banning gas, oil and wood heating, and many other countries following, and even a localized event or just some operator fuckup can cause a huge catastrophy. (also, I might have a slight bias, since I know how the infrastructure works and many people who operate it, and it's a miracly we don't have more outages.... same for the internet itself... the core of the internet is based on routers saying "This is me, i own this IP block, just send me the traffic" and all the other routers believing it and doing what it's said... so yeah)

Some form of backup heat is considered rather essential in many parts of Canada, including in suburban detached homes. A small fireplace-style natural gas burner that doesn't need electricity is common -- I think about 1 in 4 homes have one? A significant proportion further have something else, like a wood stove, or bottled gas.

When the grid goes down for an extended period, people can and do freeze, or suffer the effects of poisoning or fire, from less safe forms of heat used out of desperation. (BBQ grill or wood/trash fire indoors, etc.) The Quebec/New England region grid collapse during the 1998 ice storm was particularly bad with dozens dead. An atypical event, but many do plan for that kind of eventuality in some way, whether by having backup heat or hopefully knowing someone who does.

We lost electricity due to an ice storm for a couple of weeks when I was a kid in Mississippi. No natural gas at all, but we bought propane heaters to get through it.

Power going out isn’t apocalyptic.

I’m not saying the power going out is no big deal. I’m saying he’s not being overly dramatic.