A Success Story: Advancing Outage Prediction Modeling Capabilities for
Decision Making
Abstract
Every year millions of people in the US are affected by power outages,
disrupting the economy and daily life. Many of these outages are caused
by events such as strong winds, heavy rains, thunderstorms, floods,
tropical storms and hurricanes. At the University of Connecticut an
outage prediction model (OPM) has been developed for forecasting outages
during storms. The OPM has been operational since 2015 serving utilities
in the Northeastern US. It uses variables describing weather events,
infrastructure, land cover and elevation. Non-parametric machine
learning (ML) ensembles generate the predictions. The first version of
the model served Connecticut exclusively and was characterized by large
uncertainty in predictions due to the dataset limitations of a small
service territory and limited historical dataset. Over time, the model
expanded to include utility territories in Massachusetts and New
Hampshire, the dataset grew, the understanding between environmental
forcing and outages improved, and probabilistic operational forecasts
began to be produced. The relationship between UConn and the utility
stakeholders has grown to where operational forecasts are now used as
part of response planning to storm events by the utility. This work
leverages knowledge from the UConn OPM and utilizes a similar ML
framework in combination with non-utility-owned customer outage data to
build a community OPM for predicting customer outages along the US
Eastern Seaboard for large scale events. Proxies for proprietary
infrastructure are used including road and publicly available
transmission line data. Variables including tree type and ecoregion data
are used to account for regional diversity of the larger domain. To
validate the customer outage reference data, correlations are shown
between customer outages and utility trouble spots in the Northeast
where outage data from utilities is known. Model performance evaluated
at county and state levels shows that the model is capable of predicting
the peak number of customer outages with great accuracy, demonstrating
promise for the ultimate goal of determining return periods of outages
under current and future climate scenarios to help the public and
utilities with resiliency and response planning.