Data on major power outage events in the continental U.S.

This paper presents the data that is used in the article entitled “A Multi-Hazard Approach to Assess Severe Weather-Induced Major Power Outage Risks in the U.S.” (Mukherjee et al., 2018) [1]. The data described in this article pertains to the major outages witnessed by different states in the continental U.S. during January 2000–July 2016. As defined by the Department of Energy, the major outages refer to those that impacted atleast 50,000 customers or caused an unplanned firm load loss of atleast 300 MW. Besides major outage data, this article also presents data on geographical location of the outages, date and time of the outages, regional climatic information, land-use characteristics, electricity consumption patterns and economic characteristics of the states affected by the outages. This dataset can be used to identify and analyze the historical trends and patterns of the major outages and identify and assess the risk predictors associated with sustained power outages in the continental U.S. as described in Mukherjee et al. [1].


a b s t r a c t
This paper presents the data that is used in the article entitled "A Multi-Hazard Approach to Assess Severe Weather-Induced Major Power Outage Risks in the U.S." (Mukherjee et al., 2018) [1]. The data described in this article pertains to the major outages witnessed by different states in the continental U.S. during January 2000-July 2016. As defined by the Department of Energy, the major outages refer to those that impacted atleast 50,000 customers or caused an unplanned firm load loss of atleast 300 MW. Besides major outage data, this article also presents data on geographical location of the outages, date and time of the outages, regional climatic information, land-use characteristics, electricity consumption patterns and economic characteristics of the states affected by the outages. This dataset can be used to identify and analyze the historical trends and patterns of the major outages and identify and assess the risk predictors associated with sustained power outages in the continental U.S. as described in Mukherjee et al. [1]. &

Subject area
Risk and reliability More specific subject area Major power outages, Severe weather-induced outages, Natural hazards, Electricity service reliability Type of data Statistical analysis of the data leveraging a hybrid classificationregression model to identify and estimate the influence of various predictors attributing to increased risk of sustained power outages Data source location All the states in the continental U.S.

Data accessibility
Data is available within this article in the link provided

Value of the data
This dataset serves as a rich repository of various information related to the major outage patterns, and characteristics of the states in the continental U.S., including their climate and topographical characteristics, electricity consumption patterns, population, and land-cover characteristics.
This data provides valuable information that can be used to conduct future research in various paradigms, such as-state-level power outage risk maps for the continental U.S., predicting demand load loss, analyzing vulnerability of the U.S. states to frequent major power outages, and studying historical trends of major power outages.
The aggregated and filtered data would also help the researchers to test various types of hypothesis of their interest in the future, especially in the areas of utility planning, risk management, and policy analysis.
This dataset can be also leveraged to replicate the results corresponding to the original article following the data preparation procedures and the methodology as proposed in [1].

Data
The data presented in this article is included in a single excel file containing 55 variables. The excel file can be accessed from the link: https://engineering.purdue.edu/LASCI/research-data/outages/out agerisks. The variable measures are given in Imperial System of Measurement. The variable descriptions are summarized in Table 1. This data contains valuable information related to the severe weather-induced major power outages and the various regional characteristics that might attribute to the growing risks of such outages.

Experimental design, materials and methods
The data on major power outages and the characteristics of the regions witnessing the outages were obtained from various publicly available data sources such as the: (i) OE-417 form  The dataset is rigorously preprocessed and checked for inconsistencies to minimize the measurement errors leveraging different methods such as data visualization, analyzing the descriptive statistics as well as manual cross-checking of the observations.

Acknowledgements
Funding for this project was provided by the NSF Grants -#1728209 entitled Towards a Resilient Electric Power Grid: An Investment Prioritization Decision Framework Integrating Risks of Severe Weather-Induced Outages, and #1555582 entitled Sustainable Energy Infrastructure Planning.  Note: "NA" in the data file indicates that data was not available.

Transparency document. Supplementary material
Transparency data associated with this article can be found in the online version at https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.dib.2018.06.067.