Poorer areas have longer recovery times. Here’s how to make the return unbiased

Hurricane Helene knocked out power to more than 4 million homes and businesses as it moved across the Southeast after hitting Florida’s Big Bend region as a powerful Category 4 storm on September 26. As Helene’s rains moved into the mountains, causing devastating flooding, officials warned that repairs to downed utility lines and and the power to restore will take a few days.

Electricity is important to almost everyone—rich and poor, old and young. However, when severe storms strike, socioeconomically disadvantaged communities often wait longer to recover.

That is not just an opinion.

We analyzed data from more than 15 million consumers in 588 US counties who lost power when hurricanes hit between January 2017 and October 2020. The results show that poorer communities are actually waiting longer for the lights to come back on.

A 10 percent drop in socioeconomic status on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social vulnerability index is associated with a 6.1 percent longer cutoff on average. This equates to waiting an additional 170 minutes on average for power to be restored, and sometimes much longer.

Policy and resource implications

Another possible reason for this difference is written into the policies of the standard hurricane relief services. Typically, these policies prioritize critical infrastructure first when restoring power after an outage, then large commercial and industrial customers. Next they want to restore as many homes as possible as quickly as possible.

While this approach may seem procedurally correct, these restoration processes appear to have the unintended effect of making vulnerable communities wait longer for power to be restored. One of the reasons may be that these communities are far from critical infrastructure, or it may be that they are especially in older areas where the electrical infrastructure needs more maintenance.

The bottom line is that homes that are already more vulnerable to severe weather—either because they live in flood-prone areas or in high-risk buildings—even those that may have insurance or other resources to help them recover may also face them. the longest power outage caused by the storm. Long outages can mean refrigerated food goes bad, no running water, and delays in repairing damage, including delays in running the machine to dry out water damage and prevent mold.

Our study covered 108 service districts, including investor-owned utilities, cooperatives, and public utilities. The differential impact on poor communities was not consistent with any hurricane, region, or individual resource. We found no association with race, ethnicity or housing type. Only the average socioeconomic level stood out.

How to make energy recovery unbiased

There are ways to improve access times for everyone, beyond the work required to improve the stability of power distribution.

Policy makers and utilities can start by re-evaluating energy restoration practices and maintenance of electrical infrastructure, such as replacing worn poles and cutting down trees, with disadvantaged communities in mind.

Energy providers already have granular data about energy consumption and grid performance in their service regions. They can begin to explore other recovery methods that take into account the vulnerability of their customers in ways that do not significantly affect the length of recovery time.

In socioeconomically vulnerable regions that may face prolonged blackouts due to their geographic and possibly aging energy infrastructure, utilities and policy makers can ensure that households are well prepared to evacuate or access backup sources of energy.

For example, the US Department of Energy announced in October 2023 that it will invest in developing a number of resilience hubs and microgrids to help provide local power to critical buildings in communities where the wider grid goes down. Louisiana is planning several of these hubs, using solar and large batteries, in or near low-income communities.

Policy makers and utilities can invest in comprehensive energy infrastructure and renewable energy in these vulnerable communities. The US Department of Energy’s Justice40 program mandates that 40% of profits from certain federal energy, transportation, and housing investments benefit disadvantaged communities. That would help citizens who need public assistance the most.

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent as global temperatures rise. That increases the need for better planning and methods that don’t leave low-income residents in the dark.

Chenghao Duan, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, also contributed to this article. This article, originally published on February 7, 2024, has been updated for the increasing number of power outages from Hurricane Helene.

Chuanyi Ji is an associate professor of engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Scott C. Ganz is an associate professor of business and economics at Georgetown University.

This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the first article.