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

Prolonged power outages debilitate the economy and threaten public health. Existing research is generally limitedin its scope to a single event, an outage cause, or a region. Here, we provide one of the most comprehensiveanalyses of large-scale power outages in the U.S. from 2002 to 2019. This analysis is based on the outage datacollected under U.S. federal mandates that concern large blackouts, typically of transmission systems and excludemuch more common but smaller blackouts, typically, of distribution systems. We categorized the data into fouroutage causes and computed reliability metrics, which are commonly used for distribution-level small outagesonly 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 CoordinatingCouncil region. Our regression analysis identifies several statistically significant predictors and hypotheses forU.S. resilience to large blackouts. Furthermore, we propose a novel framework for analyzing outage data usingdifferential weighting and influential points to better understand power resilience. We share curated data andcode as Supplementary Materials.