I have no idea, I only started paying half-attention when the Energiewende started firing up and I don't read German. But I went to have a look and found someone saying they had a 30 hour outage for 30k people in Berlin in 2019.
Things break, and you need to be ready for blackouts. I'd still rather take cheap and 99% availability than expensive and 100%.
That was just the usual local incompetence. They cut a cable and couldn't get it reconnected. I don't recall the exact number, but it wasn't many houses.
Europe is actually pretty connected wrt the electricity network, so if we'll ever encounter an actual blackout you can expect it to be covered everywhere, especially in Chinese/Russian media as they'll be meme-ing how much better they're.
Despite having countless localized outages all the time, but hey... You know how dictatorships work. Can't let the truth get in the way of propaganda after all.
The linked article is about the fact that there isn't a plan how to handle a full blackout, precisely because there hasnt been one. It's the same for all developed nations, outage just haven't happened in ages so contingencies have been forgotten, basically.
1) Texans pays something like 15c/kWh and Germans pay something like 30c/kWh. The German grid is far inferior to the Texan one given that they'll both have availability in the 99% range.
2) In Texas you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case your supplier is incompetent. In Germany you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case of ... usual local incompetence? Although the Texan grid is obviously less reliable, that doesn't actually change the amount of preparation that households should be doing.
3) There is also a pretty reasonable argument that it is better to have a rare blackout than to have no plan or experience for a major blackout. It is terrible planning to assume that nothing can go wrong.
4) Texan greed got them to ~25% renewable penetration in their electricity mix. It is cheap and sustainable. The German energiewende has got them to around 40% renewable penetration and "highly dependent on Russian energy, as it gets more than half of the natural gas, a third of heating oil, and half of its coal imports from Russia. Due to this reliance, Germany blocked, delayed or watered down EU proposals to cut Russian energy imports amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine" [0]. This wasn't a close contest, the Texan regulators - the ones who leave it a bit more to greedy capitalists - are the ones that people should be putting in charge.
The failures of putting non-greedy people in charge of the German energy grid was so bad it had geopolitical consequences! That is why we try to leave it up to greedy people. If they'd listened to us greedy types they'd be knee-deep in reactors and not crippled by the threat of Russian sanctions. The people pushing the Energiewende thought they were a force for good, and it turns out they were the exact opposite. They were empowering a land war in Europe.
