This is a very interesting business. Simple and appealing to a general user but apparently worth $1k/m for business users who want access to consolidated data via API.<p>I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!
How does the US do this? In Canada, everything is so splintered. Open Data is available at various levels (municipal, provincial), but it's in different formats, many government bodies don't expose anything, and it's all very .. uncooridnated.<p>But this is not the first time I've seen data from the US which feels so well organized. Is the secret sauce the data/providers, or is the creator of this site just very good at organizing a big mess?
Hopefully they get power back soon. I'm one of the people behind the website, so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out! Especially if you're interested in the data :)
Where I live the City helpfully^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H performatively lets you see where the power is out, but provides no historical information. They pay VertiGIS to provide this service. At least today (I checked, it was something else last time I checked). Woot!<p>"Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information, it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know. If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there, then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.<p>The second important consideration for a democratically governed entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not? Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is required.<p>Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other viewpoints on this aspect.<p>On a practical level I have systems which are always on and logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more reliable way of collecting information about outages, without relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber" and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.
PG&E publishes a real-time outage map with granularity down to the individual neighborhood grid:<p><a href="https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/" rel="nofollow">https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/</a>
Does the US map have a different definition for "power outage" than the Canada/UK map on the same website? Unless I've missed news about a tornado or hurricane, the outage statistics for the US seem rather extreme to me.
The link is to their poweroutage.us, but they also cover Canada (<a href="https://poweroutage.com/ca" rel="nofollow">https://poweroutage.com/ca</a>), the UK (<a href="https://poweroutage.com/uk" rel="nofollow">https://poweroutage.com/uk</a>) and the EU (<a href="https://poweroutage.com/eu" rel="nofollow">https://poweroutage.com/eu</a>). For some reason they don't link to these from the US site.<p>Really interesting data, particularly when you compare the very low level of outages in Canada/UK compared with the US.
It's actually amazing looking at this map on a percentage basis.<p>States with 10 million plus customers that only have a few thousand without power.<p>Incredible achievement if you think about it.
why not have a more granular heatmap as the main viz? coloring by state boundaries is really unintuitive and often misleading, even without Mercator projection criticisms.
Looking at the solar data pages: Fascinating that the average power usage in Alabama is more than double California. (10kw vs 4kw)<p>I assume that's lots of air conditioning? Or perhaps downstream effects of appliance regulations?
This map is spot-on! It shows Virginia, where I live, in red with over 100k customers without power.<p>Here is a link to a video I took in my back yard about 45 minutes ago when the wind was fierce: my power went out about 10 minutes later.<p><a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/N1rcUk-1kNM?si=1s8uCdvfqa5VmrXL" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/shorts/N1rcUk-1kNM?si=1s8uCdvfqa5VmrXL</a>
Live power outage data is intentionally obscured by power providers as a matter of public safety. They report outages, and numbers of affected customers, etc. But efforts are made to ensure the locations of those customers cannot be too easily weaponized. It remains a question how effective those efforts are.
Sad that the US has all these power outages. It comes from rampant capitalism. No obligation to provide redundancy so the cheapest solution it wores on wooden poles and one tree down leads to outages.
In every weather event in the US the news reports xxx people without power. In the rest of the world it isn't a stat that makes the news. I presume this is because redundant grids don't often go down and when they dothe places where it happens has bigger problems.
With our aging infrastructure and orange man administration trying their damn best to dismantle the federal government in preparation for billionaire kleptocracy to extract as much value from USA. I don’t see it getting any better.