Power outages getting worse, study says
Americans are spending more and more time without power, according to a study by the research group Climate Central.
And Texans are feeling the impact. Between 2003 and 2012 the state was hit with 57 “major” outages, which are defined as impacting more than 50,000 customers. That worked out to an average of 800,000 homes or businesses a year losing their power at some point or another.
The vast majority of the outages are weather-related. Driving the spike, the group says are a double whammy of worsening weather patterns and an aged infrastructure more vulnerable to storms.
“Climate change is, at most, partially responsible for this recent increase in major power outages, which is a product of an aging grid serving greater electricity demand, and an increase in storms and extreme weather events that damage this system. But a warming planet provides more fuel for increasingly intense and violent storms, heat waves, and wildfires, which in turn will continue to strain, and too often breach, our highly vulnerable electrical infrastructure,” the report’s authors write.
The report ranks Texas second worst in country after Virginia for total outages. But if you look at the rate of outage per customer, the state figures in the middle of the pack. On a per capita basis, Washington D.C. figures as the place one is most likely to lose power.
Follow James Osborne on Twitter at @osborneja.
