Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy
A different timespan pattern emerged for energy demand loss , which had an average of 908 MW per year ( Table 4 ). Individual years ( 2003 , 2018 , 2019 ) experienced high average demand losses . This may be due to one or more high impact events during these years . For example , the massive 2003 power outage and blackout was triggered locally and rapidly cascaded across a large swath of the Northeast and Midwest regions . Similarly , severe weather resulting in high demand loss occurred in 2018 and 2019 . There was an increase in annual energy demand loss from an average of 612 MW losses ( 2000-2010 ) to an average of 1,248 MW losses ( 2011- mid-2020 ). These findings likely reflect the increase in the number of outage events in these years .
Table 4 . Power Outages by Year
Among the average number of customers affected per year ( 176,342 ), there were no clear patterns , with the exception that the 2003 blackout had the largest number of affected customers ( 312,116 ). The length of time needed to restore electrical power supply is an important indicator of both the reliability and dependability of the electrical power grid . Electric disruption for more than one day also showed a reduction beginning in 2011 .
206