Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Power outages across the United States are increasing in frequency and duration, raising concern about the resilience of critical infrastructure and the operational stability of regional energy systems. Prior work emphasizes system level reliability and severe weather, with limited insight into how local conditions shape outage duration at the distribution edge. This study identifies key associations of annual power outage duration in Louisiana, operationalized as a household level analog of the System Average Duration Index (h-SAIDI). Event correlated outage records, severe weather reports, and parish-scale indicators were integrated for 63 parishes across five biennial intervals (2014-2022). A Gamma generalized linear model with a log link was used to estimate associations, complemented by spatial and distributional analyses. Results indicated that outage duration reflects the interplay of severe weather factors, customer endpoint conditions, and underlying distribution network and restoration dynamics. Parishes with higher mobile home prevalence and severe weather damage exhibited longer annual outage duration. In contrast, unemployment and lack of vehicle access showed negative associations, consistent with the concentration in urbanized service territories characterized by shorter spans and greater switching options. These findings support targeted local resilience strategies across diverse service territories. KEYWORDS: Power Outage Duration; Grid Resilience; Energy System Reliability, Severe Weather Events; Customer Endpoint Conditions; Household Infrastructure; Parish-level Analysis; Gamma Regression
Authors: Maya Barcelo, Michele Maasberg
Institution: United States Naval Academy
Language: English
Subfield: Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4414801926
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