The question came up: Were weather-related power outages worse this winter than last? It certainly seems like we had a lot of massive snow and ice-caused power blackouts this season here in the Eastern U.S., but one's memory is short. Fortunately, the Department of Energy keeps statistics on power outages. After pouring through some of their spreadsheets and PDFs, I came up with these stats for the last 3 winter seasons:

This winter season was definitely worse than last. On a U.S./Canada basis, these stats show over 7,600,000 customers lost power during the winter of 2008-2009, compared to 5.7 million in the previous winter. Looking at only the East, it's even more impressive - 6 million this season versus less than half during Winter 2007-2008.

But our memories are short - looking back to the Winter 2006-2007 season, nationwide we had over 12 million outages, 7 million in the East, both beating this year. If you remove "wind" events and concentrate on "winter/snow/ice" storms, '06-'07 still wins.

Here's a summary of the major (over a quarter of a million customers) Eastern outages this season:

Northeast Mid-December Ice Storm: 1,390,000 Midwest Mid-December Ice Storm: 313,000

Midwest/Canada Late December Winds: 930,000 Late January Plains/Midwest Ice Storm: 1,700,000

Late February Midwest/Northeast Winds: 1,490,000 Last Weekend's Southeast Snow Storm: 500,000

If 7,600,000 power outages in one winter season sounds bad, though, this research also revealed that the total power outages from Hurricane Ike and his windy remnants came in at 9,258,547 (and that was in only 3 days). So, it could be worse.

One wonders how these numbers could be reduced with better electricity infrastructure in the U.S. (described as "aging" by many). The Kentucky ice storm in January cost electric providers $250 million and may cause residential bills to rise to cover the cost.

METHODS: I took the DOE storm stats for any Continental U.S. or Canada major (>25,000 outages) storm marked "Winter" "Snow" "Ice" or "Wind" between October and April (not counting Hurricanes or Severe Storms). Sadly, like me, they seem to get most of their reports from Google News, so their numbers are prone to error. "Eastern U.S." is defined as anything east of Texas through North Dakota.

DISCLAIMER: At first I used the monthly/annual summaries before November 30, 2008, but later I recompiled 2007 & 2008 numbers from the daily studies (after realizing that key storms were left out of the annual summaries). As such, this data is all prone to quite a bit of error. In the interest of full disclosure, the original, incorrect graph and numbers posted Thursday night can be viewed here.

UPDATE: Different numbers were broadcast Thursday evening but corrected Friday morning with those above. I apologize for the rewrite; I assumed the D.O.E. annual summaries would have all the daily weather-related power outages, but in fact they omitted about 20 major storms, including the major ice storm in the Plains in December 2007.

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