United States Power Outage Map

https://poweroutage.us/

by jonbaer • 1 year ago

320 151 1 year ago

poweroutage.us

jdlyga• 1 year ago

Wow what happened. Was there a bad storm?

Willingham• 1 year ago

Severe thunderstorms this morning

https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/02/16/live-updates-tor...

the_plus_one• 1 year ago

Can't speak for the entire country, but rural Virginia had a nasty ice storm pass through earlier this week [1]. I lost power for about 40 hours.

[1] https://www.wdbj7.com/2025/02/12/36k-plus-virginians-lose-po...

warmedcookie• 1 year ago

Not too bad, but here in Memphis most power lines are old and above ground, so any moderate system coming through will knock out a significant chunk of the grid.

b0b_d0e• 1 year ago

South of Atlanta we had a tornado warning around 5am. Several downed trees and power outages but I haven't heard of any actual tornadoes that touched down in my area yet.

echelon• 1 year ago

I'm in Georgia. There was a bad thunderstorm front that came through last night and briefly took out the power to my building. High winds and tornado watches across much of the state. We really need to bury our power lines.

It's very typical of this season as we experience several rounds of rapid temperature fluctuations between the 60s and 70s and the 20s and 30s. Late winter and early spring typically bring storms and tornadoes to our region.

It's funny to see everyone rush outside donning springtime apparel and then be hit with the coldest days of the season just after. And it happens every year. "Fake spring", we call it.

We've got a forecast for snow this upcoming Wednesday too! Fingers crossed.

Moto7451• 1 year ago

Like the other Georgia commenters, had a severe storm starting at 4AM trailing off at 6 and ending at 7. We lost power for about 20 minutes, all my essential gear stayed up on battery power. I’m on underground power but we have trees down in Atlanta and a lot of people lost power for a few hours.

What’s amusing is this is all on the heels of another discussion about electrical grids in the US vs Europe and a lot of points made are exactly what we experienced. Our grid can be technically as competent as anywhere but a giant storm sending a tree through a transformer or distribution line is going to make for a bad day.

_heimdall2• 1 year ago

One note I haven't seen mentioned here yet, we got a lot of rain last week prior to this storm.

Here in Alabama we got around 4.5" in my part of the state, that's nearly our average for an entire month. The ground was already very soft before this storm, making trees more susceptible to high winds. We also had a lot of lightning here last night.

I'm actually surprised I didn't lose power. I'm in a fairly rural area with mostly above ground power lines and lots of trees within falling distance of power poles and lines.

DonHopkins2• 1 year ago

Airplanes keep falling out of the sky and infrastructure keeps failing as Trump fires more and more FAA, DOE, and FEMA employees, and hands the reigns of government over to Musk and Putin.

But just wait until Trump pardons Jeffrey Skilling, and puts him in charge of the Department of Energy Office of Electricity, to overhaul grid modernization, cybersecurity, and resilience running the national power grid, the Energy Information Administration, to provide power grid data and analysis, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to regulate interstate electricity transmission, wholesale power markets, and reliability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling

anticorporate• 1 year ago

Looks like someone in Atlanta tried to turn on an RTX 5090. /s

booi• 1 year ago

PG&E with less than 10,000 customers out of power? Lies.

alsoforgotmypwd3• 1 year ago

Because we were all burned out or forced out with absurd home insurance rates.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

Gonna be some yucky weather going over the Northeast today. Winds, rain, then cold. Eww.

vonadz11• 1 year ago

Yeah heard there is ice coming down in some places. Stay safe!

martinsnow• 1 year ago

This is a lot isn't it?

bearjaws• 1 year ago

Not really, 100k homes in Georgia is roughly 3% of homes.

lillecarl• 1 year ago

If 3% of Sweden was without power it would be ground breaking news, a media shitstorm and remediations to not let it happen again.

We're further north so power is more essential to human life here, but 3% is a huge number to me when we're talking something as fundamental as electricity.

ben_w4• 1 year ago

If power to 3% of the population was lost around here, it would be considered a heads-will-roll catastrophe.

If I understand right, the largest power failure in the UK (not counting the coal miner strikes) was the 1987 storm, and that didn't reach 3% in the UK*, more like 1.15%. I can't find exact figures for the percentage affected by the 2006 European blackout, but assuming the region boundaries and population hasn't shifted too much since then, that was also a bit less than 3%.

* nor did it reach 3% in France, which was affected worse; but a quick search didn't give me a list of French power failures to compare sizes of.

luxuryballs• 1 year ago

100,000 is a lot of homes... they say there are a lot of people on earth today but it's only 6-7% of the total of people who ever lived :)

cluckindan2• 1 year ago

Now we know where Elon’s xAI data centers are.

vonadz11• 1 year ago

Hopefully they get power back soon. I'm one of the people behind the website, so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out! Especially if you're interested in the data :)

data_ders• 1 year ago

Dope project!

FYI on your LLC page has “queries” spelled “qurries”. Not sure if it’s intentional or not though.

vonadz11• 1 year ago

Thanks for catching that! Will get it fixed.

iandanforth• 1 year ago

This is a very interesting business. Simple and appealing to a general user but apparently worth $1k/m for business users who want access to consolidated data via API.

I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!

brookst3• 1 year ago

Grocery chains where lack of power = no freezers = spoilage come to mind.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

Certainly grocery stores don't need to ask someone else if their freezers are getting power, no? They would have monitors, people and computers, that are doing this job.

Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

Supermarkets pretty much all have generators on site now. There's enough value in frozen and refrigerated inventory that it's worth it. Small grocery stores probably not.

vonadz11• 1 year ago

Complex datasets are always in demand! I wish we'd gotten into something simpler, because in this specific case it's very high maintenance. The data sources constantly change and have no standard for reporting. We try to make it as simple as possible for people who need the information, so it's a lot of work on our side.

iFred• 1 year ago

Are you folks working directly with utility companies or pulling the data yourselves?

senordevnyc• 1 year ago

Would love to hear more about the demand for data like this. I have a “complex data” startup that’s likely similar in complexity (totally different area though) and I’d love to learn about who I might be able to sell the data to.

medmunds• 1 year ago

My local ISP shows power outages overlaid on their own service status map. I'm guessing it cuts down on support calls when they're down due to no power. (I suspect they get that data directly from PG&E.)

https://www.monkeybrains.net/map/

seu• 1 year ago

I can imagine that anything that involves logistics, moving people or things around. Lack of electricity might disable something that's important to you, but over which you don't have direct control or precise information about. Blackouts might affect only parts of a city, and I can see why having precise, real-time information about which parts of the city have power or not, is something really useful to re-route things around the problem.

barake• 1 year ago

Know some folks who used to work at Genscape. The whole business was selling live power generation data. They mostly accomplished it "hands-off" and without the permission of utilities.

If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.

Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.

anitil2• 1 year ago

Patio11 actually had a really interesting podcast (on his old podcast) with the founder of StormPulse about why businesses and governments care about these sorts of feeds [0]

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/08/kalzumeus-podcast-4-sto...

patio11• 1 year ago

I still get a kick out of this photo: https://x.com/patio11/status/332651272878575616

hx8• 1 year ago

You'll never get unicorn status with this, but it's probably pretty easy to get 20 customers to sign up. You'll probably cap out between 1k-10k customers if you start to really push it.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

$1000 per month is what I used to charge to a corporate card for generic SaaS products without filing a purchase order. It's not a lot. Even if your business only makes $1M/yr in revenue, $1000 is 1/83rd of monthly revenue. If anything I think they're priced too low.

dawnchorus• 1 year ago

Honest question...

I've had several ideas sort of like this over the years in areas/industries where it hadn't been done yet, but I'm always somewhat scared of running into copyright law issues. In other words, the data isn't mine, but if I gather it, transform it, and repackage it, it would likely be useful to people and certainly more useful than in its current raw form. But again, the data came from elsewhere.

In this case, as someone else mentioned, they likely just scraped other states'/private power companies'/rural cooperatives' maps or websites to get the data. How is that not problematic?

I understand that larger companies do this all the time, but isn't the risk pretty large for smaller entities?

*Edit* - I see I didn't read far enough to see that you guys are saying that you are often working directly with the utility companies etc. But the question still stands. I understand that some things where data is pulled are just attempts to get paid for other people's data, but some are not - some, like this, legitimately add value via visualization, aggregation, and transformation. I'm talking about things like the latter case.

thfuran• 1 year ago

How much of an issue something like that is probably varies by jurisdiction and exactly what you're doing and where you're getting data https://libraries.emory.edu/research/copyright/copyright-dat...

javier22• 1 year ago

We buy similar services for even more than 1k per month. Keep in mind that these aggregators also smooth over changes in the underlying apis. Dealing with 15-30 individual api vendors is a lot of hassle in itself.

freeopinion2• 1 year ago

US power providers send realtime data to the US government who provides it in a single point of access. See ODIN.

neither_color• 1 year ago

The use case is any business with dozens/hundreds/thousands of physical locations spread throughout the country. They need to keep track of adverse weather events, road closures, power outages, etc. If you have a bunch of franchises $1k is a drop in the bucket. Let's say one of your stores opens at 7am but the system reports a power outage at 4am. Now you have actionable information to deal with it before your boots on the ground even get there.

lovich• 1 year ago

when I worked in the IoT space this would have been a god send at that price, just so we could quickly answer if we had some large power outage occurring simultaneously with an outage.

Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task

Edit: would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_

vonadz11• 1 year ago

If you know anyone who might benefit from the data, let me know!

bluechair• 1 year ago

Suggestion to the void: update the map so that it shows the counties and districts without power.

vonadz11• 1 year ago

If you click on the state, you get a county view.

leeoniya2• 1 year ago

why not have a more granular heatmap as the main viz? coloring by state boundaries is really unintuitive and often misleading, even without Mercator projection criticisms.

cheschire2• 1 year ago

It depends on what your goal is, I suppose. If it's just to see the organization of data by administrative boundary, this is fine. For the people this company is selling to, that's probably even the ideal.

However for us in the cheap seats, we most likely as a group want to see number of people impacted. For that, administrative boundaries are the inverse of what we want given administrative boundaries tend to shrink as population increases.

Just goes to show the gap between B2C and B2B. In this case it seems this company knows their target audience, and it's not us.

leeoniya2• 1 year ago

im not sure i follow the logic of state boundaries being a useful level of granularity for any audience. if some suburb of Austin has a power outage affecting 10k people in a 3mi radius, that means i get to see 8.7% of the contiguous US land area turn yellow unless i specifically select to zoom to TX to discover that the affected area is 10,000x smaller?

lisper2• 1 year ago

PG&E publishes a real-time outage map with granularity down to the individual neighborhood grid:

https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/

ThinkingGuy• 1 year ago

Georgia Power, also:

https://outagemap.georgiapower.com/

hk1337• 1 year ago

Oncor (Texas) too.

https://stormcenter.oncor.com

magneticnorth• 1 year ago

As does PSE (puget sound energy) https://www.pse.com/en/outage/outage-map

joezydeco• 1 year ago

As does ComEd (Northern Illinois and Chicago)

https://secure.comed.com/FaceBook/Pages/outagemap.aspx?ipid=...

natebc2• 1 year ago

Duke Energy too: https://outagemaps.duke-energy.com

telcal• 1 year ago

PSE&G which covers parts of NJ https://outagecenter.pseg.com/external/default.html

LeoPanthera• 1 year ago

Perhaps they have improved now, but in the major winter storms of 2-3 years ago, we were regularly frustrated by how PG&E seemed to be spending more time on their innovative ways of reporting outages, but not actually fixing outages.

If your power is out, the "estimated restoration time" is a complete guess. We used to enjoy how it used to jump forwards 24 hours at exactly 6pm every day, during our 8-day outage.

bob1029• 1 year ago

The Entergy outage map is the best one I've used by a wide margin.

https://www.etrviewoutage.com/map?state=TX

lisper2• 1 year ago

Wow, that really is impressive!

blacksmith_tb• 1 year ago

Pacific Power does too, though it isn't too specific, no boundaries on the regions, just a hazy overall number[1]

1: https://www.pacificpower.net/outages-safety.html

jeroenhd• 1 year ago

Does the US map have a different definition for "power outage" than the Canada/UK map on the same website? Unless I've missed news about a tornado or hurricane, the outage statistics for the US seem rather extreme to me.

_heimdall2• 1 year ago

We had a strong storm come through yesterday afternoon and night. I didn't lose power at home but I'm not surprised that around 85k in my state did. I saw quite a few down trees and leaning power poles this morning.

Part of the problem was that, at least here, we got 4" of rain earlier this week. This storm brought more rain, high winds, and a lot of lightning.

827a• 1 year ago

Very bad ice and wind storm across the eastern seaboard this weekend.

thedougd• 1 year ago

Several days of rain (couple inches) and high winds this morning as a front moved through.

Symbiote2• 1 year ago

According to this report [1] the average time between blackouts in 5 years in the UK, vs 3½ years in the USA and less than 12 months in Canada. (Page 8.)

[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... (via https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/reports/q3-2019/)

niceice• 1 year ago

It's actually amazing looking at this map on a percentage basis.

States with 10 million plus customers that only have a few thousand without power.

Incredible achievement if you think about it.

xyst• 1 year ago

With our aging infrastructure and orange man administration trying their damn best to dismantle the federal government in preparation for billionaire kleptocracy to extract as much value from USA. I don’t see it getting any better.

thunkingdeep2• 1 year ago

Three unlucky people in Wyoming without power :/

alsoforgotmypwd3• 1 year ago

Customers, not people. Could be residential or commercial. Could even be low priority, unoccupied customers in the middle of nowhere. The advances since the adoption of smart meters is grid operators know exactly who is using how much power and who is out in near-real time as the cellular modems (assuming there is cell service in the vicinity) tells them right away when there's a problem. I'm curious if large customers have satellite to cell nanocell access points to keep in touch with remote sites and for their critical vendors, like electricity utilities, to also gain access where there isn't ordinarily cell service.

thunkingdeep2• 1 year ago

Oh so three customers could be thousands of people if it was a factory that was closed or something like that.

It makes sense to prioritize repairing the biggest dollar signs first, I suppose.

sdenton4• 1 year ago

Looking at the solar data pages: Fascinating that the average power usage in Alabama is more than double California. (10kw vs 4kw)

I assume that's lots of air conditioning? Or perhaps downstream effects of appliance regulations?

natebc2• 1 year ago

It's absolutely air conditioning. It's a very humid place.

fuzzythinker• 1 year ago

It needs to show % instead of n-k+.

samwillis• 1 year ago

The link is to their poweroutage.us, but they also cover Canada (https://poweroutage.com/ca), the UK (https://poweroutage.com/uk) and the EU (https://poweroutage.com/eu). For some reason they don't link to these from the US site.

Really interesting data, particularly when you compare the very low level of outages in Canada/UK compared with the US.

scrlk• 1 year ago

The UK regulator introduced the Interruptions Incentive Scheme in 2002 to encourage distribution networks to reduce customer interruptions and minutes lost. It triggered a large wave of investment in network automation (remote switching, auto reclosers etc.)

Scoundreller• 1 year ago

So basically the difference between 9s is investment/cost.

At least here (Canada), utils push all of their costs to end-users & IIUC have an incentive to have high capex/low opex networks because of regulated return.

As a Canadian residential electrical customer, we pay a lot in base fees from what I hear relative to US customers. Sure it's more reliable, but tbh, it's not worth spending much to get 5 9s (5 mins of downtime a year) vs 4 9s (50 minutes/yr). Heck, even 500 minutes/yr would be fine for me.

But commercial/industrial users won't feel the same way, and managed to successfully spread the cost of adding 9s among users that largely don't care.

m3047• 1 year ago

Where I live the City helpfully^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H performatively lets you see where the power is out, but provides no historical information. They pay VertiGIS to provide this service. At least today (I checked, it was something else last time I checked). Woot!

"Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information, it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know. If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there, then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.

The second important consideration for a democratically governed entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not? Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is required.

Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other viewpoints on this aspect.

On a practical level I have systems which are always on and logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more reliable way of collecting information about outages, without relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber" and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.

kleiba2• 1 year ago

I'd love to have the opportunity to compare this to other countries.

__m• 1 year ago

How comparable is that though? Germany for example has less severe weather than the US

kleiba2• 1 year ago

Not all of the US has the same weather either.

luxurytent• 1 year ago

How does the US do this? In Canada, everything is so splintered. Open Data is available at various levels (municipal, provincial), but it's in different formats, many government bodies don't expose anything, and it's all very .. uncooridnated.

But this is not the first time I've seen data from the US which feels so well organized. Is the secret sauce the data/providers, or is the creator of this site just very good at organizing a big mess?

notwhereyouare• 1 year ago

i think the creator is good. I think they are just scraping different power company outage maps. If you look in some places there's 0 data because the power company doesn't have a true outage map

icegreentea22• 1 year ago

Yeah, and for context, there is a Canada version of the map.

https://poweroutage.com/ca/

evolve2k3• 1 year ago

An open data commitment across gov agencies was an explicit commitment and project started in 2013 during the Obama administration.

“On May 9, 2013, President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. Making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government.”

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/open

I know about this because the Australian government then followed and worked on doing the same.

Data.gov became a central place to access and even request that departments open specific data sets and in more formats.

https://data.gov

https://data.gov.au

The annual GovHack hackathon was supported by many agencies, leading to a strong prize pool and people from various agencies on hand looking for teams who over the weekend had done cool things with their data (specially if it was public interest). Some projects were further funded coming out of the hackathons.

https://govhack.org/about

Year on year ongoing commitment to open data in government got us to here.

It was a great long term initiative furthering values of cizitzen engagement, open data and open government.

cavisne2• 1 year ago

This is a third party site that just scrapes utility websites. So open data initiatives are not relevant.

chrisco255• 1 year ago

Most power companies in the U.S. are not run by the government.

dpc050505• 1 year ago

Hydro-Quebec has a web app that works very well to look at outages and service status.

croisillon• 1 year ago

is that what happens when you vote for the Distressful Outages (of) Generated Electricity?

gunian• 1 year ago

very cool love tools that make the game more accessible to the less smart folk like me fires and power outage wonder what else is used

reader9274• 1 year ago

That poor dude in Maine

TZubiri• 1 year ago

Is this outage at all related with the recent gvmt personnel reductions?

teknopaul• 1 year ago

Sad that the US has all these power outages. It comes from rampant capitalism. No obligation to provide redundancy so the cheapest solution it wores on wooden poles and one tree down leads to outages. In every weather event in the US the news reports xxx people without power. In the rest of the world it isn't a stat that makes the news. I presume this is because redundant grids don't often go down and when they dothe places where it happens has bigger problems.

techolic2• 1 year ago

Surprised that Puerto Rico isn't included, which has a lot of power outages of different scale.

vonadz11• 1 year ago

The electricity provider there specifically asked us to not publish the data, and has gone to extensive lengths to block us from getting it.

techolic2• 1 year ago

That sucks. Would you be interested in adding states/territories with no data to the map?

TimCTRL• 1 year ago

Wait, you guys have power outages in the US?

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

This map is spot-on! It shows Virginia, where I live, in red with over 100k customers without power.

Here is a link to a video I took in my back yard about 45 minutes ago when the wind was fierce: my power went out about 10 minutes later.

https://youtube.com/shorts/N1rcUk-1kNM?si=1s8uCdvfqa5VmrXL

js2• 1 year ago

Haven't lost power here in my neck of NC yet, but I was sure we would. Blew through here around 9 am this morning:

https://ibb.co/zhrxwx93

Still pretty gusty out but nothing like this morning.

cluckindan2• 1 year ago

That doesn’t look too fierce… the worst storm I’ve seen live had the entire treeline bending over like there was an ent king approaching from downwind.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Relevant: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?layers=d40907...

freeopinion2• 1 year ago

Live power outage data is intentionally obscured by power providers as a matter of public safety. They report outages, and numbers of affected customers, etc. But efforts are made to ensure the locations of those customers cannot be too easily weaponized. It remains a question how effective those efforts are.

EE84M3i• 1 year ago

Is this to prevent burglary? I'm not sure I follow the logic here.

UltraSane• 1 year ago

Yes.

United States Power Outage Map

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