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!
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.
[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/08/kalzumeus-podcast-4-sto...
Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...
But what do they do then? Call around to every nearby store asking if they still have power, and have space in cold storage? While those stores may well be calling yet other stores?
How does that work when there are 6 affected stores and 12 nearby ones that still have power? Maybe 3 of those have lots of cold storage, and another 4 have some but not lots free.
A centralized view could easily be worth $1k/month.
(and you are very fortunate if your utility reaches out to you in mass outages (>1000 customers), and especially if they do it via API your systems can act on)
And those individual stores report to centralized ops. This is a terrible usecase
A grocery chain will see maybe one outage in 10 years that is bad enough to take out the store and internet+cell phone networks.
Dispatching someone is absolutely more cost effective for these rare occasions.
But the ISP case definitely is a valid case for 1k/month.
I could see a "smart" corporate operation that detects the outages and starts to enact plans to tentatively start moving equipment around depending on predicted outage duration. Then again, I could also see where that would be deemed too expensive to do, and this is just a tech fantasy.
Many grocery stores rely on short notice rental of refrigerated semi trailers rather than the ongoing maintenance / testing of generators.
People always think generators are an easy solution, but that tends to be the response from people that have not actually looked into what generator solutions look like
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.
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_
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?
“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.
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.
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.
Privatised electricity companies often seek to maintain a veneer of social good. Opening data for which you plan to not make open tools yourself can be a good way to have tools built that you don’t pay for that make you look good.
Seems like a data issue where the municipality was double-counted and one in Quebec for some reason.
"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.
https://secure.comed.com/FaceBook/Pages/outagemap.aspx?ipid=...
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.
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.
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... (via https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/reports/q3-2019/)
Really interesting data, particularly when you compare the very low level of outages in Canada/UK compared with the US.
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.
Ontario's Energy Board has a dashboard (https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNmY1YjU0NmUtMTJhYi00N...) that says in 2023, total average outage time was ~5hrs (and that's somewhat typical of the last 10ish years).
Hydro Quebec says that in 2023 (https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/hqd-0... FR sorry) the average downtime was ~4.5 hours.
States with 10 million plus customers that only have a few thousand without power.
Incredible achievement if you think about it.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.wdbj7.com/2025/02/12/36k-plus-virginians-lose-po...
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.
https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/02/16/live-updates-tor...
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.
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.
I assume that's lots of air conditioning? Or perhaps downstream effects of appliance regulations?
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.
Still pretty gusty out but nothing like this morning.
It makes sense to prioritize repairing the biggest dollar signs first, I suppose.
I’ve seen a wire melt which took out three houses - not sure if it ever appeared in state-wide data.
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.
We just don't really give much of a shit about our people or infrastructure. So we all just make do. When my power goes out every winter, my furnace doesn't work, so I break out the portable propane heater, sleeping bag, extra blankets, winter gear. I keep telling myself I'll buy a generator, but the expense and complexity aren't really worth it for a few days. A bunch of my neighbors have wood stoves.
More rare act-of-god scenarios like the 2009 ice storm[1] left my family without power for 2 weeks. I'm sure there was some action taken, but I continued to lose power at that house at least 2-3 times a month easily.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2009_North_American_ic...
https://www.thelocal.it/20230719/blackouts-hit-italian-citie...
People in France, South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom can go 5 or more years between power outages.
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...
https://ground.news/article/power-outages-in-stockholm-more-...
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.
Georgia is big enough that percentages is the right measure. If this had been Rhode Island or Hawaii then law of large numbers no longer applies and correlation of failures means that seeing even 30% affected isn't crazy. But Georgia is 11 million people, doesn't get that excuse, 3% is still a lot.
If you sit on your backside and say "eh, not too bad, these things happen", then you normalise failure, and things keep getting worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance