Electricity is a key resource for the majority of societal functions and constitutes an important sector in the critical infrastructure of modern societies. Disturbances in power supply can have cascading effects on interdependent public sectors and ordinary citizens (Rinaldi et al., 2001; Cohen, 2010; Ghanem et al., 2016). However, it seems nearly impossible to prevent the occurrence of power shortages. This has been evident in the aftermath of the hurricane Lee and the hurricane Maria in 2017. Because of the changing climate, an increase of hurricanes, flooding, and high river flows, are expected. The need of a national energy policy have been addressed (see e.g. Hoffman, 2015), including policy for manual power cut in the case of power shortage. The Swedish Energy Agency has developed a national policy for handling national power shortage. The policy, called STYREL is part of Swedish Crisis Management System. This paper focus on the Swedish power shortage policy, STYREL in relation to national policies in Germany and the USA. The aim is to compare the three countries policies in the event of power shortage. The focus is on the organization of the planning process, which actors are part of the process, and how the societal important users are identified and ranked. Policy networks, including actors from both public and private sector are of special interest.