Flores, Casey, and Colleagues Highlight the Disproportionate Impacts of Severe Weather-driven Power Outages
Posted: 5/16/2024 (CSDE Research)
CSDE Affiliate Joan Casey and colleagues released an article in Plos Climate, titled “Powerless in the storm: Severe weather-driven power outages in New York State, 2017–2020“. This article was lead-authored by Nina Flores, a Phd candidate in Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Flores and Casey also discussed their findings in a co-authored piece in The Conversation. 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, authors 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. Authors used these data to characterize the impact of extreme weather events on power outages from 2017–2020, while considering neighborhood vulnerability factors.