Correlating Power Outage Spread with Infrastructure Interdependencies During Hurricanes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how infrastructure interdependencies influence the spread of power outages during hurricanes, highlighting the importance of interconnectedness in outage propagation and resilience planning.

Contribution

It introduces a data-driven analysis linking infrastructure network topology to outage spread during hurricanes, providing new insights into infrastructure resilience.

Findings

Positive correlation between infrastructure interconnectivity and outage extent

Critical infrastructure proximity predicts broader outage regions

Interdependency analysis aids in resilience planning

Abstract

Power outages caused by extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, can significantly disrupt essential services and delay recovery efforts, underscoring the importance of enhancing our infrastructure's resilience. This study investigates the spread of power outages during hurricanes by analyzing the correlation between the network of critical infrastructure and outage propagation. We leveraged datasets from Hurricanemapping.com, the North American Energy Resilience Model Interdependency Analysis (NAERM-IA), and historical power outage data from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)'s EAGLE-I system. Our analysis reveals a consistent positive correlation between the extent of critical infrastructure components accessible within a certain number of steps (k-hop distance) from initial impact areas and the occurrence of power outages in broader regions. This insight suggests that understanding the interconnectedness among critical infrastructure elements is key to identifying areas indirectly affected by extreme weather events.