Having lived in Germany for 13 years now...I can attest to the fact that they all have expectations of 24-hours per day of power. Any outage lasting longer than 20 minutes becomes a major stress issue for a German. They all want explanations out of the power folks for a 1-hour outage or more...so it becomes a public relations nightmare when huge windstorms come through and knock alot of power out.
The impression I had in Europe was that their electric rates were shockingly higher than ours. True?