In Canada, it didn't take more than a couple of hours before the fabric of society started to break down during the big power outage for the North-East of the North American continent. The grid was down for more than a week in some places and we were very fortunate to be mostly off-grid by then and to have two massive backup generators as well as a gas station full of fuel. If not for us being prepared the region where we lived would have been much harder affected. Strangely enough, us new immigrants to the region were better prepared for this than those that had lived there all of their lives, they just took the grid instability for granted. If that outage had happened in the dead of winter instead of in August many people would have died.
With the article about Europe, I'll note the average house here uses half the electricity of your very efficient Canadian house (probably more gas for heating though).
And it's in much of Europe where a village or a few villages being without power for a day or more is headline news.
e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cek7jvnm2p9o
> With the article about Europe, I'll note the average house here uses half the electricity of your very efficient Canadian house (probably more gas for heating though).
No, we were way ahead of our efficient house here in Europe because we were able to design that efficiency right into the structure. That house sipped power and the heater ran off the damaged trees on the property that we cleaned out annually.
I kept pretty careful logs of consumption before pulling the trigger on going off-grid and it's interesting to see how the reduction in consumption factored as much into that as the increase in renewable energy. Once the windmill was added the generator basically never ran again.