Identifying power outage hotspots to support risk management planning

Secure and reliable power systems are vital for modern societies and economies. While there is a focus in the literature on predicting power outages caused by severe weather events, relatively little literature exists on identifying hot spots, locations where outages occur repeatedly and at a higher rate than expected. Reliably identifying hotspots can provide critical input for risk management efforts by power utilities, helping them to focus scarce resources on the most problematic portions of their system. In this article, we show how existing work on Moran's I spatial statistic can be adapted to identify power outage hotspots based on the types and quantities of data available to utilities in practice. The local Moran's I statistic was calculated on a grid cell level and a set of criteria were used to filter out which grid cells are considered hotspots. The hotspot identification approach utilized in this article is an easy method for utilities to use in practice, and it provides the type of information needed to directly support utility decisions about prioritizing areas of a power system to inspect and potentially reinforce.