In recent years, the intensity and frequency of wet snowfall has increased throughout Italy. These snow events often cause prolonged electrical interruptions due to the formation of snow blankets on overhead lines which, in some cases, have led to the breakage of conductors or guard cables, even leading to the fall of pylons. In this work we present a new meteorological reanalysis dataset called MERIDA used for the identification of wet snow in the period 2010-2017. First, the snow load series was simulated for the period using MERIDA hourly temperature, wind intensity and precipitation at a spatial resolution of 4 km. Wet snow loads were calculated using the cylindrical wet snow sleeve accretion model (Makkonen ISO 12494: 2001) for each point of the Italian domain. Some relevant wet snow case studies from the last 15 years were analyzed and compared with electrical outages. Finally, the procedure for reconstructing the expected values of snow loads was developed with the aim of updating the current legislation. The reconstruction is carried out through statistical analysis relating to the distribution of extreme events using two methods: BMAX and POT. The results obtained with the two techniques in Italy are quite comparable.