Spatio-Temporal Insights into Recent Electricity Outages in the U.S.: Drivers, Trends, and Impacts

Electrification is known as the greatest engineering achievement in the 20st century, as its drives our daily lives and the operation of mission-critical systems and services. Any disruption in the electric power delivery infrastructure could impose catastrophic economical, social, environmental, and political consequences. Even though there are concerted efforts to mitigate or predict the power outages that may lead to larger-scale blackouts, the data made available by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) during 2015-2022 on electric emergency incidents and disturbances in the U.S. indicate that there is an increase in frequency and duration of power outages across the country. In this paper, we discuss a user-friendly visualization tool, a power grid outage dashboard, that sheds some lights on the patterns behind, regional vulnerability, and impacts of these outages. The developed dashboard helps in decision-making on the future allocation of funds and reinforcement investments to tackle the power outages in an effort to build a more reliable power system. Several examples indicate the importance of finding better forecasting and mitigation techniques for power system outages driven by some particular events and in different geographical regions across the U.S.