U.S. Power Resilience for 2002--2019

TL;DR

This comprehensive study analyzes U.S. power outages from 2002 to 2019, identifying resilience patterns, causes, and predictors, and introduces a new analytical framework for outage data to improve understanding of power system robustness.

Contribution

The paper provides the most extensive analysis of U.S. power outages over 17 years, categorizes outage causes, and proposes a novel framework for outage data analysis.

Findings

Six states are most resilient since 2010

Power resilience has improved against natural hazards in the south and northeast

Western region experiences disproportionately high human attack incidents

Abstract

Prolonged power outages debilitate the economy and threaten public health. Existing research is generally limited in its scope to a single event, an outage cause, or a region. Here, we provide one of the most comprehensive analyses of U.S. power outages for 2002--2019. We categorized all outage data collected under U.S. federal mandates into four outage causes and computed industry-standard reliability metrics. Our spatiotemporal analysis reveals six of the most resilient U.S. states since 2010, improvement of power resilience against natural hazards in the south and northeast regions, and a disproportionately large number of human attacks for its population in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council region. Our regression analysis identifies several statistically significant predictors and hypotheses for power resilience. Furthermore, we propose a novel framework for analyzing outage data using differential weighting and influential points to better understand power resilience. We share curated data and code as Supplementary Materials.