[HN Gopher] United States Power Outage Map
___________________________________________________________________
United States Power Outage Map
Author : jonbaer
Score : 220 points
Date : 2025-02-16 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (poweroutage.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (poweroutage.us)
| jdlyga wrote:
| Wow what happened. Was there a bad storm?
| Willingham wrote:
| Severe thunderstorms this morning
|
| https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/02/16/live-updates-tor...
| the_plus_one wrote:
| Can't speak for the entire country, but rural Virginia had a
| nasty ice storm pass through earlier this week [1]. I lost
| power for about 40 hours.
|
| [1]: https://www.wdbj7.com/2025/02/12/36k-plus-virginians-lose-
| po...
| warmedcookie wrote:
| Not too bad, but here in Memphis most power lines are old and
| above ground, so any moderate system coming through will knock
| out a significant chunk of the grid.
| b0b_d0e wrote:
| South of Atlanta we had a tornado warning around 5am. Several
| downed trees and power outages but I haven't heard of any
| actual tornadoes that touched down in my area yet.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm in Georgia. There was a bad thunderstorm front that came
| through last night and briefly took out the power to my
| building. High winds and tornado watches across much of the
| state. We really need to bury our power lines.
|
| It's very typical of this season as we experience several
| rounds of rapid temperature fluctuations between the 60s and
| 70s and the 20s and 30s. Late winter and early spring typically
| bring storms and tornadoes to our region.
|
| It's funny to see everyone rush outside donning springtime
| apparel and then be hit with the coldest days of the season
| just after. And it happens every year. "Fake spring", we call
| it.
|
| We've got a forecast for snow this upcoming Wednesday too!
| Fingers crossed.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| Like the other Georgia commenters, had a severe storm starting
| at 4AM trailing off at 6 and ending at 7. We lost power for
| about 20 minutes, all my essential gear stayed up on battery
| power. I'm on underground power but we have trees down in
| Atlanta and a lot of people lost power for a few hours.
|
| What's amusing is this is all on the heels of another
| discussion about electrical grids in the US vs Europe and a lot
| of points made are exactly what we experienced. Our grid can be
| technically as competent as anywhere but a giant storm sending
| a tree through a transformer or distribution line is going to
| make for a bad day.
| _heimdall wrote:
| One note I haven't seen mentioned here yet, we got a lot of
| rain last week prior to this storm.
|
| Here in Alabama we got around 4.5" in my part of the state,
| that's nearly our average for an entire month. The ground was
| already very soft before this storm, making trees more
| susceptible to high winds. We also had a lot of lightning here
| last night.
|
| I'm actually surprised I didn't lose power. I'm in a fairly
| rural area with mostly above ground power lines and lots of
| trees within falling distance of power poles and lines.
| anticorporate wrote:
| Looks like someone in Atlanta tried to turn on an RTX 5090. /s
| booi wrote:
| PG&E with less than 10,000 customers out of power? Lies.
| alsoforgotmypwd wrote:
| Because we were all burned out or forced out with absurd home
| insurance rates.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Gonna be some yucky weather going over the Northeast today.
| Winds, rain, then cold. Eww.
| vonadz wrote:
| Yeah heard there is ice coming down in some places. Stay safe!
| martinsnow wrote:
| This is a lot isn't it?
| bearjaws wrote:
| Not really, 100k homes in Georgia is roughly 3% of homes.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| If 3% of Sweden was without power it would be ground breaking
| news, a media shitstorm and remediations to not let it happen
| again.
|
| We're further north so power is more essential to human life
| here, but 3% is a huge number to me when we're talking
| something as fundamental as electricity.
| hhh wrote:
| Power outages are pretty common at least where I have lived
| in America. It's not uncommon to lose power for 20-30
| minutes and sometimes up to a few hours. Outages with
| storms are extremely common.
|
| More rare act-of-god scenarios like the 2009 ice storm[1]
| left my family without power for 2 weeks. I'm sure there
| was some action taken, but I continued to lose power at
| that house at least 2-3 times a month easily.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2009_North_Americ
| an_ic...
| ossobuco wrote:
| In Italy I think I had a single power outage in the last
| 10 years and it was planned ahead of time for maintenance
| work.
| alsoforgotmypwd wrote:
| Compared to other countries, America has normalized a
| different level of deviancy. Perhaps 5 things are worse
| in America while 3 things are better when making a single
| country comparison. It's important to understand the
| tolerance and need for service varies. For example,
| single family homes without fireplaces and firewood
| storage areas and also lacking natural gas service and
| off-gridable power storage are completely reliant on grid
| electricity power for heat.
| omoikane wrote:
| I live in California and have had at least one power outage
| every year, usually lasting a few hours. Somehow we just
| got used to it, I think it's an example of normalization of
| deviance.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
| ben_w wrote:
| If power to 3% of the population was lost around here, it
| would be considered a heads-will-roll catastrophe.
|
| If I understand right, the largest power failure in the UK
| (not counting the coal miner strikes) was the 1987 storm, and
| that didn't reach 3% in the UK*, more like 1.15%. I can't
| find exact figures for the percentage affected by the 2006
| European blackout, but assuming the region boundaries and
| population hasn't shifted too much since then, that was also
| a bit less than 3%.
|
| * nor did it reach 3% in France, which was affected worse;
| but a quick search didn't give me a list of French power
| failures to compare sizes of.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Remember that 3% of Georgia is not 3% of the entire U.S.
| ben_w wrote:
| And? 3% of the UK isn't 3% of Europe.
|
| Georgia is big enough that percentages is the right
| measure. If this had been Rhode Island or Hawaii then law
| of large numbers no longer applies and correlation of
| failures means that seeing even 30% affected isn't crazy.
| But Georgia is 11 million people, doesn't get that
| excuse, 3% is still a lot.
| karaterobot wrote:
| [delayed]
| luxuryballs wrote:
| 100,000 is a lot of homes... they say there are a lot of
| people on earth today but it's only 6-7% of the total of
| people who ever lived :)
| cluckindan wrote:
| Now we know where Elon's xAI data centers are.
| vonadz wrote:
| Hopefully they get power back soon. I'm one of the people behind
| the website, so if you have any questions, feel free to reach
| out! Especially if you're interested in the data :)
| data_ders wrote:
| Dope project!
|
| FYI on your LLC page has "queries" spelled "qurries". Not sure
| if it's intentional or not though.
| vonadz wrote:
| Thanks for catching that! Will get it fixed.
| iandanforth wrote:
| This is a very interesting business. Simple and appealing to a
| general user but apparently worth $1k/m for business users who
| want access to consolidated data via API.
|
| I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know
| who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't
| have a need!
| brookst wrote:
| Grocery chains where lack of power = no freezers = spoilage
| come to mind.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Certainly grocery stores don't need to ask someone else if
| their freezers are getting power, no? They would have
| monitors, people and computers, that are doing this job.
|
| Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility
| reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...
| alt227 wrote:
| Is there not a possibility that if a neighbouring area has
| gone down, then your area might be at risk of going down if
| they need to do maintenace on all surrounding areas to fix
| the issue? I would imagine its useful for store owners to
| know the power is out a mile down the road, and might
| enable them to start making preparations in case they are
| next.
| brookst wrote:
| Think more about centralized ops. Any individual store will
| of course notice their power has gone out.
|
| But what do they do then? Call around to every nearby store
| asking if they still have power, and have space in cold
| storage? While those stores may well be calling yet other
| stores?
|
| How does that work when there are 6 affected stores and 12
| nearby ones that still have power? Maybe 3 of those have
| lots of cold storage, and another 4 have some but not lots
| free.
|
| A centralized view could easily be worth $1k/month.
|
| (and you are very fortunate if your utility reaches out to
| you in mass outages (>1000 customers), and especially if
| they do it via API your systems can act on)
| therein wrote:
| I mean, your stores certainly must be pinging back HQ. If
| they stop pinging, something is up. Gotta determine if it
| is power or connectivity.
|
| But the ISP case definitely is a valid case for 1k/month.
| kortilla wrote:
| > Think more about centralized ops. Any individual store
| will of course notice their power has gone out.
|
| And those individual stores report to centralized ops.
| This is a terrible usecase
| orzig wrote:
| I've never worked in grocery but from my experience in
| other pre-internet industries I can easily imagine a
| politically marginalized CTO who would rather spend $1k on
| a turnkey solution than herd 100 cats who can't reliably
| format a spreadsheet of data.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| That turnkey solution is powered by similar cats. But at
| least there's a contract to club them over the head with.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Last year, we had a major wind event that caused
| significant loss of power in the area. My local store
| pulled in multiple trucks dropping off their freezer
| trailers. The logistics of getting those took some time and
| spoilage was definitely an issue. There was no saving the
| produce, but the frozen items were saved.
|
| I could see a "smart" corporate operation that detects the
| outages and starts to enact plans to tentatively start
| moving equipment around depending on predicted outage
| duration. Then again, I could also see where that would be
| deemed too expensive to do, and this is just a tech
| fantasy.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've noticed the smaller the store/chain the more likely
| they are to try to save the food (and if you lose power
| because of a freezing storm that can be relatively easy).
| The larger Walmarts just go to generator or immediately
| give up.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Supermarkets pretty much all have generators on site now.
| There's enough value in frozen and refrigerated inventory
| that it's worth it. Small grocery stores probably not.
| vonadz wrote:
| Complex datasets are always in demand! I wish we'd gotten into
| something simpler, because in this specific case it's very high
| maintenance. The data sources constantly change and have no
| standard for reporting. We try to make it as simple as possible
| for people who need the information, so it's a lot of work on
| our side.
| iFred wrote:
| Are you folks working directly with utility companies or
| pulling the data yourselves?
| vonadz wrote:
| Both!
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Would love to hear more about the demand for data like this.
| I have a "complex data" startup that's likely similar in
| complexity (totally different area though) and I'd love to
| learn about who I might be able to sell the data to.
| vonadz wrote:
| You can email me at tech at poweroutage.us if you want to
| talk.
| medmunds wrote:
| My local ISP shows power outages overlaid on their own service
| status map. I'm guessing it cuts down on support calls when
| they're down due to no power. (I suspect they get that data
| directly from PG&E.)
|
| https://www.monkeybrains.net/map/
| seu wrote:
| I can imagine that anything that involves logistics, moving
| people or things around. Lack of electricity might disable
| something that's important to you, but over which you don't
| have direct control or precise information about. Blackouts
| might affect only parts of a city, and I can see why having
| precise, real-time information about which parts of the city
| have power or not, is something really useful to re-route
| things around the problem.
| barake wrote:
| Know some folks who used to work at Genscape. The whole
| business was selling live power generation data. They mostly
| accomplished it "hands-off" and without the permission of
| utilities.
|
| If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would
| happily lease space to setup sensors.
|
| Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering
| data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.
| anitil wrote:
| Patio11 actually had a really interesting podcast (on his old
| podcast) with the founder of StormPulse about why businesses
| and governments care about these sorts of feeds [0]
|
| [0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/08/kalzumeus-
| podcast-4-sto...
| patio11 wrote:
| I still get a kick out of this photo:
| https://x.com/patio11/status/332651272878575616
| hx8 wrote:
| You'll never get unicorn status with this, but it's probably
| pretty easy to get 20 customers to sign up. You'll probably cap
| out between 1k-10k customers if you start to really push it.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| [delayed]
| bluechair wrote:
| Suggestion to the void: update the map so that it shows the
| counties and districts without power.
| vonadz wrote:
| If you click on the state, you get a county view.
| leeoniya wrote:
| why not have a more granular heatmap as the main viz? coloring by
| state boundaries is really unintuitive and often misleading, even
| without Mercator projection criticisms.
| cheschire wrote:
| It depends on what your goal is, I suppose. If it's just to see
| the organization of data by administrative boundary, this is
| fine. For the people this company is selling to, that's
| probably even the ideal.
|
| However for us in the cheap seats, we most likely as a group
| want to see number of people impacted. For that, administrative
| boundaries are the inverse of what we want given administrative
| boundaries tend to shrink as population increases.
|
| Just goes to show the gap between B2C and B2B. In this case it
| seems this company knows their target audience, and it's not
| us.
| lisper wrote:
| PG&E publishes a real-time outage map with granularity down to
| the individual neighborhood grid:
|
| https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Georgia Power, also:
|
| https://outagemap.georgiapower.com/
| hk1337 wrote:
| Oncor (Texas) too.
|
| https://stormcenter.oncor.com
| magneticnorth wrote:
| As does PSE (puget sound energy)
| https://www.pse.com/en/outage/outage-map
| joezydeco wrote:
| As does ComEd (Northern Illinois and Chicago)
|
| https://secure.comed.com/FaceBook/Pages/outagemap.aspx?ipid=...
| natebc wrote:
| Duke Energy too: https://outagemaps.duke-energy.com
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Does the US map have a different definition for "power outage"
| than the Canada/UK map on the same website? Unless I've missed
| news about a tornado or hurricane, the outage statistics for the
| US seem rather extreme to me.
| _heimdall wrote:
| We had a strong storm come through yesterday afternoon and
| night. I didn't lose power at home but I'm not surprised that
| around 85k in my state did. I saw quite a few down trees and
| leaning power poles this morning.
|
| Part of the problem was that, at least here, we got 4" of rain
| earlier this week. This storm brought more rain, high winds,
| and a lot of lightning.
| 827a wrote:
| Very bad ice and wind storm across the eastern seaboard this
| weekend.
| thedougd wrote:
| Several days of rain (couple inches) and high winds this
| morning as a front moved through.
| niceice wrote:
| It's actually amazing looking at this map on a percentage basis.
|
| States with 10 million plus customers that only have a few
| thousand without power.
|
| Incredible achievement if you think about it.
| xyst wrote:
| With our aging infrastructure and orange man administration
| trying their damn best to dismantle the federal government in
| preparation for billionaire kleptocracy to extract as much value
| from USA. I don't see it getting any better.
| thunkingdeep wrote:
| Three unlucky people in Wyoming without power :/
| alsoforgotmypwd wrote:
| Customers, not people. Could be residential or commercial.
| Could even be low priority, unoccupied customers in the middle
| of nowhere. The advances since the adoption of smart meters is
| grid operators know exactly who is using how much power and who
| is out in near-real time as the cellular modems (assuming there
| is cell service in the vicinity) tells them right away when
| there's a problem. I'm curious if large customers have
| satellite to cell nanocell access points to keep in touch with
| remote sites and for their critical vendors, like electricity
| utilities, to also gain access where there isn't ordinarily
| cell service.
| thunkingdeep wrote:
| Oh so three customers could be thousands of people if it was
| a factory that was closed or something like that.
|
| It makes sense to prioritize repairing the biggest dollar
| signs first, I suppose.
| bombcar wrote:
| Or it could literally be three houses - depends on how
| accurate the reporting is when there's a minor fault.
|
| I've seen a wire melt which took out three houses - not
| sure if it ever appeared in state-wide data.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Looking at the solar data pages: Fascinating that the average
| power usage in Alabama is more than double California. (10kw vs
| 4kw)
|
| I assume that's lots of air conditioning? Or perhaps downstream
| effects of appliance regulations?
| natebc wrote:
| It's absolutely air conditioning. It's a very humid place.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| It needs to show % instead of n-k+.
| samwillis wrote:
| The link is to their poweroutage.us, but they also cover Canada
| (https://poweroutage.com/ca), the UK (https://poweroutage.com/uk)
| and the EU (https://poweroutage.com/eu). For some reason they
| don't link to these from the US site.
|
| Really interesting data, particularly when you compare the very
| low level of outages in Canada/UK compared with the US.
| scrlk wrote:
| The UK regulator introduced the Interruptions Incentive Scheme
| in 2002 to encourage distribution networks to reduce customer
| interruptions and minutes lost. It triggered a large wave of
| investment in network automation (remote switching, auto
| reclosers etc.)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| So basically the difference between 9s is investment/cost.
|
| At least here (Canada), utils push all of their costs to end-
| users & IIUC have an incentive to have high capex/low opex
| networks because of regulated return.
|
| As a Canadian residential electrical customer, we pay a lot
| in base fees from what I hear relative to US customers. Sure
| it's more reliable, but tbh, it's not worth spending much to
| get 5 9s (5 mins of downtime a year) vs 4 9s (50 minutes/yr).
| Heck, even 500 minutes/yr would be fine for me.
|
| But commercial/industrial users won't feel the same way, and
| managed to successfully spread the cost of adding 9s among
| users that largely don't care.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Btw, at least for Ontario and Quebec, current average
| downtime is below 4 9s, and quite close to your quoted
| 500m/yr time.
|
| Ontario's Energy Board has a dashboard (https://app.powerbi
| .com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNmY1YjU0NmUtMTJhYi00N...) that says in
| 2023, total average outage time was ~5hrs (and that's
| somewhat typical of the last 10ish years).
|
| Hydro Quebec says that in 2023
| (https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-
| donnees/pdf/hqd-0... FR sorry) the average downtime was
| ~4.5 hours.
| cavisne wrote:
| Its the same in the US. Except for texas which does some
| slightly more innovative things. Its really hard to do
| anything else than overbuild, Texas was strongly criticized
| for underbuilding its network when there was an ice storm a
| few years ago.
| m3047 wrote:
| Where I live the City helpfully^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H performatively
| lets you see where the power is out, but provides no historical
| information. They pay VertiGIS to provide this service. At least
| today (I checked, it was something else last time I checked).
| Woot!
|
| "Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information,
| it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the
| important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know.
| If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise
| you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery
| kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there,
| then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm
| not changing it.
|
| The second important consideration for a democratically governed
| entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not?
| Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is
| required.
|
| Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical
| information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the
| power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of
| opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the
| power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's
| the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where
| outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then
| maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other
| viewpoints on this aspect.
|
| On a practical level I have systems which are always on and
| logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went
| out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry
| from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more
| reliable way of collecting information about outages, without
| relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a
| contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or
| passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity
| (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure
| that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm
| sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber"
| and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.
| kleiba wrote:
| I'd love to have the opportunity to compare this to other
| countries.
| luxurytent wrote:
| How does the US do this? In Canada, everything is so splintered.
| Open Data is available at various levels (municipal, provincial),
| but it's in different formats, many government bodies don't
| expose anything, and it's all very .. uncooridnated.
|
| But this is not the first time I've seen data from the US which
| feels so well organized. Is the secret sauce the data/providers,
| or is the creator of this site just very good at organizing a big
| mess?
| notwhereyouare wrote:
| i think the creator is good. I think they are just scraping
| different power company outage maps. If you look in some places
| there's 0 data because the power company doesn't have a true
| outage map
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Yeah, and for context, there is a Canada version of the map.
|
| https://poweroutage.com/ca/
| philistine wrote:
| Euh, I don't think Manitoba Hydro has 600,000 customers in
| Quebec. I wouldn't trust that map.
| momothereal wrote:
| If you go on the page for Manitoba Hydro, it says there
| is 1 customer in Quebec: "South Cypress". Although South
| Cypress is a municipality in Manitoba.
|
| Seems like a data issue where the municipality was
| double-counted and one in Quebec for some reason.
|
| https://poweroutage.com/ca/utility/1408
| evolve2k wrote:
| An open data commitment across gov agencies was an explicit
| commitment and project started in 2013 during the Obama
| administration.
|
| "On May 9, 2013, President Obama signed an executive order that
| made open and machine-readable data the new default for
| government information. Making information about government
| operations more readily available and useful is also core to
| the promise of a more efficient and transparent government."
|
| https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/open
|
| I know about this because the Australian government then
| followed and worked on doing the same.
|
| Data.gov became a central place to access and even request that
| departments open specific data sets and in more formats.
|
| https://data.gov
|
| https://data.gov.au
|
| The annual GovHack hackathon was supported by many agencies,
| leading to a strong prize pool and people from various agencies
| on hand looking for teams who over the weekend had done cool
| things with their data (specially if it was public interest).
| Some projects were further funded coming out of the hackathons.
|
| https://govhack.org/about
|
| Year on year ongoing commitment to open data in government got
| us to here.
|
| It was a great long term initiative furthering values of
| cizitzen engagement, open data and open government.
| cavisne wrote:
| This is a third party site that just scrapes utility
| websites. So open data initiatives are not relevant.
| dpc050505 wrote:
| Hydro-Quebec has a web app that works very well to look at
| outages and service status.
| croisillon wrote:
| is that what happens when you vote for the Distressful Outages
| (of) Generated Electricity?
| gunian wrote:
| very cool love tools that make the game more accessible to the
| less smart folk like me fires and power outage wonder what else
| is used
| reader9274 wrote:
| That poor dude in Maine
| TZubiri wrote:
| Is this outage at all related with the recent gvmt personnel
| reductions?
| teknopaul wrote:
| Sad that the US has all these power outages. It comes from
| rampant capitalism. No obligation to provide redundancy so the
| cheapest solution it wores on wooden poles and one tree down
| leads to outages. In every weather event in the US the news
| reports xxx people without power. In the rest of the world it
| isn't a stat that makes the news. I presume this is because
| redundant grids don't often go down and when they dothe places
| where it happens has bigger problems.
| techolic wrote:
| Surprised that Puerto Rico isn't included, which has a lot of
| power outages of different scale.
| TimCTRL wrote:
| Wait, you guys have power outages in the US?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| This map is spot-on! It shows Virginia, where I live, in red with
| over 100k customers without power.
|
| Here is a link to a video I took in my back yard about 45 minutes
| ago when the wind was fierce: my power went out about 10 minutes
| later.
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/N1rcUk-1kNM?si=1s8uCdvfqa5VmrXL
| js2 wrote:
| Haven't lost power here in my neck of NC yet, but I was sure we
| would. Blew through here around 9 am this morning:
|
| https://ibb.co/zhrxwx93
|
| Still pretty gusty out but nothing like this morning.
| cluckindan wrote:
| That doesn't look too fierce... the worst storm I've seen live
| had the entire treeline bending over like there was an ent king
| approaching from downwind.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Relevant:
| https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?layers=d40907...
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(page generated 2025-02-16 23:00 UTC)