Hurricane Outages: Analysis Details the Where, and Who, of Increased Future Power Cuts

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Newswise — Georgia and northern Florida are likely to be hardest hit by increasing hurricane-induced power outages along the Atlantic coast in the future, with Hispanic, non-white, low-income and elderly populations most affected, according to new research led by the University of Michigan.

Hurricanes are predicted to become even more frequent and severe in the coming years if the planet’s temperatures rise by another 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels—expected by the end of the century without drastic action taken. 

The total 3 C rise will bring increased outages to areas that have historically seen few service interruptions, such as the northern Atlantic Coast. And those increases will nearly double the costs of outages, from today’s $6.2 billion per year average to $11 billion in today’s dollars.

The findings, funded in part by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and published in the journal PNAS, underscore the need for planning and resource allocations to prepare for what’s coming. 

“There are parts of the country where we expect to see more outages, particularly northern Florida, the southern Atlantic, such as North Carolina and South Carolina, and some areas up into the mid-Atlantic,” said Seth Guikema, U-M professor of civil and environmental engineering, as well as industrial and operations engineering, and co-corresponding author of the study. “Then there are areas where we have more uncertainty, places like Texas where our models suggest they’ll have fewer outages.”

Lower-income communities already experience longer waits for service restoration in some cases, and U-M’s research shows that problem is likely to worsen. 

To produce its analysis, U-M and its research partners combined data from models and data sets covering climate, hurricanes and information about the people living in affected regions:

• Simulated hurricanes, 28,000 of them, based on atmospheric and oceanic data, processed by co-author, Kerry Emmanuel, formerly of M.I.T. and now chief scientific officer at WindRisk Tech.
• Historic outage data at the Census tract level—possibly including localized data as specific as wind characteristics, soil moisture and tree root depth.
• An evaluation, based on historical hurricane tracks and projections, as well as Census data, of which groups of people would be impacted the most.
• The Interruption Cost Estimate Calculator, which measures costs from outages as well as estimates the benefits of efforts to improve reliability.

“What we wind up with is the areas that are, and will be, at highest risk for power outages,” said Zaira Pagan Cajigas, a U-M Ph.D. graduate in industrial and operations engineering and co-lead author of the research paper. “We can go further and see the population makeup in those areas, and that’s how we identified that Hispanics, non-whites, low-income and elderly residents bear the brunt of these incidents.”

Roughly 78% of major power outages in the United States result from weather events, and those events are occurring more often in recent years. Tropical cyclones are responsible for nine out of 10 major outages. As Earth exceeds the Paris Agreement warming target, they are intensifying faster, bringing more rainfall, moving more slowly and penetrating further inland.

“Our hope is that this analysis will help government agencies, utilities and individual businesses and residents better understand where system hardening and other climate adaptation actions need to be taken, and the potential degree of change in outage risk and costs in the future,” Guikema said.

The research team also includes Charles Fant, Brent Boehlert and C.X. Maier of Industrial Economics Inc., and Corrinne Hartin and Marcus Sarofim of the EPA.

Study: Climate Change Impacts on Tropical Cyclone-Induced Power Outage Risk: Socio-Demographic Differences in Outage Burdens (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2502266122)