As demand for electricity rises and climate change brings more frequent and extreme storms, residents in rural and suburban communities must have access to the minimal electricity they need to survive a large, long-duration (LLD) power outage.
As demand for electricity rises and climate change brings more frequent and extreme storms, residents in rural and suburban communities must have access to the minimal electricity they need to survive a large, long-duration (LLD) power outage.
A new study in the journal Risk Analysis compared strategies for providing emergency power to residents in two hypothetical New England communities during such an event. The results suggest that cooperative strategies like sharing a higher capacity generator among multiple homes cost 10 to 40 times less than if each household used its own generator.
“Our findings provide impetus for utilities, regulators, and policy makers to make collective options readily accessible to communities,” says co-author M. Granger Morgan, Hamerschlag University Professor of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and co-director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making.
LLD-outages are defined as blackouts that extend over multiple service areas or states and last several days or longer. Over the last decade, severe storms have caused LLD-outages affecting millions of people. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy disrupted power in 21 states, affecting over 8 million customers with approximately 800,000 customers still without power after 10 days. And in 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated electrical service across Puerto Rico for months.
Read more at Society for Risk Analysis
Photo Credit: GB_photo via Pixabay
