Outing Power Outages: Real-time and Predictive Socio-demographic Analytics for New York City

Abstract

Electrical outages continue to occur despite technological innovations and improvements to electric power distribution infrastructure. In this paper, we describe a tool that was designed to acquire and collect data on electric power outages in New York City since July 2020. The electrical outages are then displayed on a front-end application, which is publicly available. We use the collected outage data to analyze these outages and their socio-economic impacts on electricity vulnerable population groups. We determined that there was a slightly negative linear relationship between income and number of outages. Finally, a Markov Influence Graph was created to better understand the spatial and temporal relationships between outages.