Abstract:
Major recent blackouts underline the severe economic, health, and social costs of outages on households and firms. Unplanned outages show strong seasonality linked to weather, hinting at climate-related risks for electricity grids. Poorer municipalities tend to face systematically higher outage rates, revealing possible inequities in grid resilience. Climate change amplifies outage risk through both extreme weather damage and heat-driven grid overload. Frequent, detailed, and harmonized outage reporting is essential for evidence-based grid resilience policy.
