Characteristics of power outages from compound weather extremes in Florida
The growing number of extreme weather events has contributed to an increasing number and severity of power outages. However, the complex interplay of extreme weather events and their compounding effects on power outage characteristics (e.g. event duration) has not been comprehensively explored. Powe...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
IOP Publishing
2025-01-01
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| Series: | Environmental Research: Climate |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-5295/adf252 |
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| Summary: | The growing number of extreme weather events has contributed to an increasing number and severity of power outages. However, the complex interplay of extreme weather events and their compounding effects on power outage characteristics (e.g. event duration) has not been comprehensively explored. Power outage data is often not publicly available, especially at high spatial resolution. Identifying outages related to weather events can also be challenging, as various weather variables can trigger or modulate power outages when they occur, in isolation or combined. Here, we use county-level power outage data from EAGLE-I for the state of Florida from 2015 to 2022 to identify moderate and major weather-related outages and analyze their characteristics. We show that total outage counts were higher in metro areas than in non-metro areas. However, the percentage of weather-related power outages was higher in non-metro areas than in metro areas. The spatial variation of grid reliability indicators derived from all weather-related events follows similar patterns as derived when just focusing on tropical cyclone events, highlighting the importance of these types of extremes in creating prolonged outages. Considering six relevant weather variables, we identify univariate and compound events (i.e. when more than one weather variable was extreme at the time of the outage). Univariate events have a relatively homogenous pattern across the state of Florida, while compound events have more localized hotspots. The average duration of the outages also increases when moving from univariate to multivariate events. Our results shed light on the relative importance of different weather variables (in isolation or combination) in creating power outages with different characteristics across Florida. Identifying such relationships is an important step toward understanding how power outage frequency and/or severity may change when certain extreme weather events become more frequent and/or intense. |
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| ISSN: | 2752-5295 |