U.S. Resilience to large-scale power outages in 2002–2019

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 large-scale power outages in the U.S. from 2002 to 2019. This analysis is based on the outage data collected under U.S. federal mandates that concern large blackouts, typically of transmission systems and exclude much more common but smaller blackouts, typically, of distribution systems. We categorized the data into four outage causes and computed reliability metrics, which are commonly used for distribution-level small outages only but useful for analyzing large blackouts. 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 U.S. resilience to large blackouts. 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.