Power Utility

Electricity is essential to just about everyone – rich and poor, old and young. Yet, when severe storms strike, socioeconomically disadvantaged communities often wait longest to recover. That isn’t just a perception. We analyzed data from over 15 million consumers in 588 U.S. counties who lost power when hurricanes made landfall between January 2017 and October 2020. The results show that poorer communities did indeed wait longer for the lights to go back on. A 1-decile drop in socioeconomic status in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social vulnerability index was associated with a 6.1% longer outage on average. This corresponds to waiting an extra 170 minutes on average for power to be restored, and sometimes much longer. The top map shows the total duration of power outages over eight storms by county. The lower map is a comparison with socioeconomic status taken into account, showing that counties w...

Hurricane Helene cut power to more than 4 million homes and businesses as it moved across the Southeast after hitting Florida’s Big Bend region as a powerful Category 4 storm on Sept. 26, 2024. As Helene’s rains moved into the mountains, causing devastating flooding, officials warned that fixing downed utility lines and restoring power would take days to weeks. Electricity is essential to just about everyone – rich and poor, old and young. Yet, when severe storms strike, socioeconomically disadvantaged communities often wait longest to recover. That isn’t just a perception. We analyzed data from over 15 million consumers in 588 U.S. counties who lost power when hurricanes made landfall between January 2017 and October 2020. The results show that poorer communities did indeed wait longer for the lights to go back on. A 10 percentile drop in socioeconomic status in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social vulnerability index was assoc...