The average American experiences about 2 hours of power outage annually, excluding major weather events, according to the Energy Information Administration. That number tripled when events like winter storms, wildfires, and hurricanes factor in.
Average power outage duration varies significantly between states, from 1.5 hours in landlocked South Dakota to nearly 30 hours in the coastal state of North Carolina, according to the most recent EIA data. On average, states prone to natural disasters and extreme weather see significantly longer disruptions.
For most people, outages are a mild inconvenience. In extreme cases, however, they can lead to dangerous consequences. Without power, people are more susceptible to extreme heat or cold depending on the season, as well as food spoilage, water filtration systems becoming disabled, and medications that require refrigeration becoming unstable and unusable.
Outages are also expensive. The Department of Energy estimates power outages cost U.S. businesses roughly $150 billion per year.
In addition to weather, the U.S. power grid is also vulnerable to physical attacks and cyberattacks by bad actors outside and within U.S. borders. Attacks on U.S. power grids rose to an all-time high in 2022, with physical threats to electric infrastructure climbing 77% to 163, according to the DOE. Power grids are becoming a popular target of domestic extremists, who strike transformers and power lines in potentially coordinated attacks.
Should a catastrophic event occur, there's essentially no such thing as spare parts for the country's power grid. Security experts say that a fairly low-tech coordinated attack against a few integral nodes of the country's power grid is all it would take to cause widespread long-term outages from coast to coast, resulting in hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of deaths.
Stacker cited data from the Energy Information Administration to identify the 50 biggest power outages in 2022. Outages are ranked by the number of customers affected. The outage must have lasted at least 1 hour to qualify for the ranking. All data is considered preliminary by the EIA.
