Power outage hot spots are more severe than previously known, according to researchers at Texas A&M who used AI to build a map of at-risk areas around the U.S.
The hot spots, including some in Texas, are affected by severe weather and the demands of new data centers, says Ali Mostafavi, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Texas A&M, and a member of the research team. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Clarify for me – these are places that are already seeing more outages, or could, or both?
Ali Mostafavi: Actually, it’s both. What we have done is we look at the last 10 years of outage data and crunch them using an interpretable AI model to understand, first, whether the rate of outages have been increasing, and if so, which areas are hotspots.
So based on this historical data, what we are seeing is that after 2019, we are seeing an increase of 20% in the rate of power outages, both in terms of the frequency of this outage extents and also the duration. And this has two implications: that these are outages in the areas that are already vulnerable, and if we don’t take actions, this continues to grow. And this is alarming.
What happened in 2019? Why was that the year that we saw such a big spike in these?
I think the main reason is the increased frequency of the storm events and weather-related extreme weather events, including cold snaps and hurricanes and tornadoes.
And if increased frequency of these events, when they meet an already aging power grid, they create more frequent and longer outages.
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You just used the word alarming. And then I’ve heard you also say “shocking.” So why were you shocked? Why are you alarmed? I mean, what does this tell you about what could be ahead?
The shocking part is that our hypothesis at the beginning of the research was that there are areas that are hot spots in the U.S. in terms of the vulnerability to outages, and also there is a growth in the rate of outages. But the extent of it was surprising and shocking to us.
The fact that in the past 10 years we have seen around 8 billion customer hours of outage just put that in perspective. That will translate to many, many hours per individual customer across the United States.
The alarming part is that the amount of investment needed to improve the resilience of the grid is significantly high, and the procedures for implementing these resiliency measures are slow.
So if we don’t implement these resiliency measures in the near future, it will be a catch-up game. And the cost of repair becomes so much that we’ll not leave enough funds for resilience investment to mitigate the future impact.
In a quick look at the map, Texas, by and large, doesn’t look that bad. Southern California really looked to be the worst. But what areas in Texas are of concern for these power outage hotspots?
The areas of concern in Texas are usually areas that are in the path of hurricanes and flood-prone areas. And we have seen the increased frequency of these events as well – hurricanes and the outages caused in Houston metro area in the previous summer is an example of that.
And the magnitude of that outage at the time of the year that everybody is dependent on their air conditioning is significant … in subsequent impacts in terms of the health impacts, et cetera.
So while we see the hot spots in Texas are not as significant as other regions, we still have in recent history, like Winter Storm Uri and Hurricane Beryl, examples that the power grid in Texas also would benefit significantly from resilience improvements. And if we don’t act now, we will have the same trends that we see in the other parts of the country.
