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Impact Study of Thunderstorms on the US Power Grid Using Publicly Available Datasets

by Narayan Bhusal, Sangkeun M Lee, Nils M Stenvig, Supriya Chinthavali, Phani Teja V Kuruganti
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Book Title
2024 IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition (T&D)
Publication Date
Page Numbers
1 to 5
Publisher Location
New Jersey, United States of America
Conference Name
IEEE/PES Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition (T&D)
Conference Location
Anaheim, California, United States of America
Conference Sponsor
Southern California Edition
Conference Date
-

This work analyzes the impact of thunderstorms on the US power grid based on publicly available data. Since thunderstorms can bring lightning, heavy precipitation, and wind storms, analyzing their impact on the power system provides a combined correlation of lightning strikes, floods, and wind storms on power outages. This paper leverages publicly available thunderstorm datasets from the National Weather Service (NWS) and power outage datasets from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information (EAGLE-I) to study the correlation between thunderstorms and power outages. This work is analyzing the patterns of thunderstorms from 2013-2022, which shows that the thunderstorms are not slowing down and will seem to continue their impact on human life in the future. This work also analyzes the monthly and yearly pattern of the impact of thunderstorms on power systems at the national, state, and county level.