Texas A&M designs nationwide tracker of vulnerable power systems

Researchers at Texas A&M University’s Urban Resilience AI Lab are using machine learning to identify areas of the country most at risk of power outages.

The system, called the Power System Vulnerability Index, identifies hotspots and annual rate trends. Researchers said the data included 179 million data points sorted by time and location.

“Using data from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we were able to study the effect of weather events on the frequency and duration of nationwide power outages over the past 10 years,” Junwei Ma, a postdoctoral researcher in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said in a press release.

A paper outlining the work shows that several regions — including the West Coast, East Coast, Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes — have power systems with high vulnerability.