How important are socioeconomic factors for hurricane performance of power systems? An analysis of disparities through machine learning
This study addresses social disparities in power system resilience for communities affected by hurricanes, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new data.
The paper investigated whether socioeconomic factors affect hurricane-related power system performance in Florida, finding that these variables are considerably important for modeling system performance, indicating potential social disparities in power outages.
This paper investigates whether socioeconomic factors are important for the hurricane performance of the electric power system in Florida. The investigation is performed using the Random Forest classifier with Mean Decrease of Accuracy (MDA) for measuring the importance of a set of factors that include hazard intensity, time to recovery from maximum impact, and socioeconomic characteristics of the affected population. The data set (at county scale) for this study includes socioeconomic variables from the 5-year American Community Survey (ACS), as well as wind velocities, and outage data of five hurricanes including Alberto and Michael in 2018, Dorian in 2019, and Eta and Isaias in 2020. The study shows that socioeconomic variables are considerably important for the system performance model. This indicates that social disparities may exist in the occurrence of power outages, which directly impact the resilience of communities and thus require immediate attention.