What is normal, or has been normal? Forgive the ruminations of an old man - however the OP did ask...
My experience varies widely with a strong dependence on population density in the US/Germany.
- As a small kid in SW MN in the '40s in a farming community in the middle of nowhere, with long lines and no power station close, every storm normally meant a power failure. Flashlights and kerosene lanterns/stove were regularly used. Kerosene lanterns were not allowed outside of the kitchen-dining room. Candles were not allowed. Fire was a real danger in old wood houses. I even went to the local hardware store to purchase my own flashlights and batteries with my money earned delivering newspapers. I discovered the run time diffences of the many C/D cell types.
- In NW MN, only the larger storms meant a power failure, but then for a day or more. I remember the early GE sub-cell NiCds packaged as D-cells very well.
-in the USFS in Northern Idaho on the Bitteroot Divide, the station generated it's own power -> a diesel generator in the horse pasture. It was turned on for the cooks & cook shack in the morning, left on to ease operations during the day most of the time, and shut off after the cooks were finished cleaning. Maybe 12/12. The rest of the time all radios (many) ran on batteries. Flashlights were SOP.
- in the military, some times the local power was not good (~100VAC, ~50hz, maybe). I routinely discovered the lower limit of AC operating voltages. The power quality was bad enough (~80VAC, ~45hz) that one of the small sites I was at gave up and started generating it's own power 24x7. In Germany the remote military sites lost power only a few times a year.
- Now that I am living mostly in larger cities in the US/Germany, power failures are normally short (minutes), but during high-wind or ice storms, the power can fail for hours if not days. Power failures in the large US cities are only a few times a year for outages ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. However, there are pockets of older suburbs in th US with the early buried HV wiring old enough that the insulation is rotting in the ground, leading to shorts and some BIG breaker trips. Then the outage is afternoon/evening. German cities have clearly more reliable power than the US cities - at least for now. eg: I have yet to be in a power outage in the Nürnberg area. The more remote locations in German/Austria/Switzerland assume the use of flashlights at night, especially since hallway lights are normally controlled by timers (w/short times!).
Edit: to actualize the comments above, the power stability of all locations is about the same, save for the USFS station which has been deactivated as too expensive to operate that far back in the boonies.
2nd Edit: I have been in major power failures where the electric grid failed. ie: the 1965 electric grid failure in the NE of the US. That was impressive to watch an entire city go dark with only spots of light at hospitals, etc. and after a day or so, most of those spots also went dark. There is no guarantee that massive grid failures are not possible again!