Inside Energy reporter Jordan Wirfs-Brock found a disturbing trend when she, a few years ago, analyzed United States Department of Energy power outage data from 2000 to 2014.
Her efforts revealed that outages — including weather-related outages — across the country were rising rapidly due to aging electrical infrastructure, a growing population and more frequent extreme weather. Combined, all were were straining the country’s electrical grid, according to her summary article.
Wirfs-Brock’s data came from the Inside Energy grid disruption database, which Inside Energy compiled and standardized from annual data available at from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The numbers she discovered are startling, too.
According to her analysis, the five-year annual average of outages doubled every five years, meaning the latest year in her report (2014) was four times what it was the 15 years before that.
Here is some of the interesting data found from her investigation.
- 2000-2004: 44 reported grid outages per year, on average
- 2005-2009: 100 reported grid outages per year, on average
- 2010-2014: 200 reported grid outages per year, on average
- 2000: 2.5 grid disruption events per month
- 2013: 14.5 grid disruption events per month (a 6-fold increase over 2000)
- 2011 had the most reported disruptions, an average of 25.6 per month
- There were 19 weather-related grid disruptions that affected more than 1,000,000 customers (8 hurricanes, 3 winter storms)
- June is the most common month for severe weather outages, followed by August and July.
Are you protected?
So the questions now become…
- Are you prepared for a significant outage?
- Is your critical IT gear backed up by a reliable UPS system?
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