Eaton Blackout Tracker: United States Annual Report 2014

Overview

The Blackout Tracker Annual Report is Eaton’s yearly tally of power outages across the United States, and the 2014 edition is the seventh in the series. Eaton builds the dataset from news coverage, utility and TV station websites, and reader reports rather than from utility filings, so it captures the small neighborhood-level failures that federal reporting thresholds miss. The report answers a practical question for anyone who runs a building: how often does the grid fail, where, why, and what does that downtime cost?

Key Findings

• Eaton tabulated 3,634 reported outages in 2014, a rise of more than 12 percent over the 3,236 logged in 2013. Roughly 14.2 million people lost power, about 200,000 more than the year before.
• The typical reported outage affected close to 4,000 people and lasted about 43 minutes. Summed across the year, reported downtime came to 151,366 minutes, or roughly 105 days.
• California topped the state rankings for the sixth consecutive year with 537 outages, followed by Texas (178), Michigan (164), Pennsylvania and New York (148 each), Ohio (136), Virginia (117), New Jersey (116), Washington (104), and Massachusetts (98).
• Weather and falling trees were the single largest cause at 1,081 outages, with faulty equipment and human error close behind at 1,026. Vehicle accidents accounted for 356, and animals for about 150, or roughly 4 percent of the total.
• Eaton cites U.S. Department of Energy figures putting the annual cost of outages, surges, and spikes at more than $150 billion, and notes that the grid now loses power 285 percent more often than it did when federal tracking began in 1984.
• The report describes an $876 billion grid of about 7,000 power plants and more than 5 million miles of line serving 150 million customers through 3,300 utilities, and quotes an Electric Power Research Institute estimate of $338 billion to $476 billion to modernize it.
• Feature sections cover a Johns Hopkins model ranking New York, Philadelphia, and Jacksonville as the cities facing the largest increase in hurricane-related outage risk, a $12 million penalty tied to the 2011 Southwest blackout, and lists of the ten most significant and ten most unusual outages of the year.

Why It Matters for Daylighting

Most of the outages Eaton counts are short, local, and unplanned, and a large share of them fall during working hours. In a warehouse or manufacturing building lit entirely by electric fixtures, a 43-minute outage stops picking, forklift traffic, and shipping until the lights come back, and it forces workers to find exits in the dark. A roof fitted with prismatic skylights keeps the floor usable through a daytime outage with no backup equipment. That passive resilience is a benefit that rarely shows up in a lighting payback calculation, yet it is exactly the kind of exposure this report quantifies.

The state rankings also matter for facility planning. The top ten states for outages include the country’s largest logistics markets: California’s Inland Empire, the Dallas and Houston corridors, central Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Ohio and Michigan industrial belt. Owners with portfolios in those states can treat toplighting as a reliability measure as well as an energy-code strategy. Because weather and falling trees are the leading cause, skylight specifications in these markets should also address wind uplift, hail impact, and fall protection at each roof opening.

About the Source

Eaton is a global power-management company that sells uninterruptible power supplies, surge protection, and power distribution equipment, so the report’s closing section on protecting a business naturally points toward backup-power products. The 74-page 2014 United States report was published in early 2015 with no byline; the PDF metadata lists Brad Wyckoff as the file author. It opens with an introduction and national overview, then devotes a page to each of the 50 states with outage counts, causes by month, and a notable local incident. The complete report, including every state profile, is available from Eaton.