Powerless in the storm: Severe weather-driven power outages in New York State, 2017–2020

Abstract

The vulnerability of the power grid to severe weather events is a critical issue as climate change is expected to increase extreme events, which can damage components of the power grid and/or lessen electrical power supply, resulting in power outages. However, largely due to an absence of granular spatiotemporal outage data, we lack a robust understanding of how severe weather-driven outages, their community impacts, and their durations distribute across space and socioeconomic vulnerability. Here, we pair hourly power outage data in electrical power operating localities (n = 1865) throughout NYS with urbanicity, CDC Social Vulnerability Index, and hourly weather (temperature, precipitation, wind speed, lightning strike, snowfall) data. We used these data to characterize the impact of extreme weather events on power outages from 2017–2020, while considering neighborhood vulnerability factors. Specifically, we assess (a) the lagged effect of severe weather on power outages, (b) common combinations of severe weather types contributing to outages, (c) the spatial distribution of the severe weather-driven outages, and (d) disparities in severe weather-driven outages by degree of community social vulnerability. We found that across NYS, 39.9% of all outages co-occurred with severe weather. However, certain regions, including eastern Queens, upper Manhattan and the Bronx of NYC, the Hudson Valley, and Adirondack regions were more burdened with severe weather-driven outages. Using targeted maximum likelihood estimation, we found that the frequency of heat-, precipitation-, and wind-driven outages disproportionately impacted vulnerable communities in NYC. When comparing durations of outages, we found that in rural regions, precipitation- and snow-driven outages lasted the longest in vulnerable communities. Under a shifting climate, anticipated increases in power outages will differentially burden communities due to regional heterogeneity in severe weather event severity, grid preparedness, and population socioeconomic profiles/vulnerabilities. As such, policymakers must consider these characteristics to inform equitable grid management and improvements.