Association of social vulnerability factors with power outage burden in Washington state: 2018–2021

Abstract

Major power outages have risen over the last two decades, largely due to more extreme weather conditions. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the distribution of power outages and its relationship to social vulnerability and co-occurring hazards. We examined the associations between localized outages and social vulnerability factors (demographic characteristics), controlling for environmental factors (weather), in Washington State between 2018–2021. We additionally analyzed the validity of PowerOutage.us data compared to federal datasets. The population included 27 counties served by 14 electric utilities. We developed a continuous measure of daily outage burden using PowerOutage.us data and operationalized social vulnerability using four factors: poverty level, unemployment, disability, and limited English proficiency. We applied zero-altered lognormal generalized additive mixed-effects models to characterize the relationship between social vulnerability and daily power outage burden, controlling for daily minimum temperature, maximum wind speed, and precipitation, from 2018 to 2021 in Washington State. We found that social vulnerability factors have non-linear relationships with outages. Wind and precipitation are consistent drivers of outage occurrence and duration. There are seasonal effects that vary by county-utility area. Both PowerOutage.us and federal datasets have missing and inaccurate outage data. This is the first study evaluating differential exposure to localized outages as related to social vulnerability that has accounted for weather and temporal correlation. There is a lack of transparency into power outage distribution for those most vulnerable to climate impacts, despite known contributions by electric utilities to climate change. For effective public health surveillance of power outages and transparency, outage data should be made available at finer spatial resolution and temporal scales and/or utilities should be required to report differential exposure to power outages for socially vulnerable populations.