Analysis of Historical Power Outages of the United States and the National Risk Index

Several works have been documented in the literature to study the societal effect of power outages and to analyze their correlation with the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). However, the relationship between National Risk Index (NRI) and power outages is yet to be explored. This work analyzes the NRI indices such as Risk, Expected Annual Loss, Social Vulnerability, and Community Resilience with several resilience metrics such as event duration, impact duration, recovery duration, impact level, impact rate, recovery rate, recovery to impact ratio, and area under the outage curves to see the correlation of NRI indices with the resilience metrics. The results show that NRI indices such as Risk and Expected Annual Loss increase with the increase of event duration, impact duration, and recovery duration. All Other metrics are indifferent to the change in the Risk and EAL ratings. The results also show that there is no strong relationship between all the metrics and community resilience and social vulnerability. This work also performed the sensitivity analysis of the extreme event selection process. This sensitivity analysis reveals that the way of identifying extreme events has a significant impact on the evaluation of the events.