Apparently part of the problem in the US is unreliable electricity supply. In Europe you can reasonably count on the electricity supply not having an outage of more than a few hours (and even that's rare). According the HN comments on past submissions on this topic, it seems that's not the case in the US.
The US doesn't have an unreliable electricity supply. The overwhelming majority of electric outages have a duration fewer than 4 hours, and most of those have a duration fewer than 2 hours.
There are problems in our more rural areas where the population density is low and damaged equipment may only affect very few customers. They're the lowest on the priority to get restored. In extreme cases it may be several days before your power will be restored. That's an outage event you can expect to occur once every decade.
But if you live in an urban area, urban being 5,000 or more people living in a town, then you have very reliable electricity.
