Growing up, whenever there was a hurricane or a big storm, Jason Robinson enjoyed looking at maps from electric utilities’ websites that showed power outages.
But there was one problem: The United States has so many electric utilities, each with their own website and map, that he had to open a bunch of different websites to see what was going on in one area.
So in 2016, he set out on what he called a “side project” to build his own site consolidating all the outage maps into one place, combining his personal interest with his desire to learn more about cloud computing.
“I started building it out, and one thing led to another, and it just grew and grew,” Robinson, who goes by the nickname “Chachi,” told CNN. “Turned out a lot of people found it interesting.”
Now, nearly a decade since its launch, his side project PowerOutage.US has become one of the foremost resources during severe weather, giving the public, media and businesses the tools to quickly understand the extent of a storm’s impact on electric power.
The site’s power outage maps are updated nearly in real time and combine data from about 950 electric utilities serving more than 150 million customers in the United States, turning America’s sprawling, decentralized power grid into a simple color-coded map. Users can also drill down further to see the total number of outages by state, county and company. Altogether, the map illustrates in bright colors the path of destruction left behind by a hurricane, tornado or other severe weather.
When storms strike, millions of users visit PowerOutage.US; it hit a peak of 1.8 million site requests per hour October 9 when Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida. While its main map is free, some companies, government agencies and media outlets such as CNN pay for detailed and historical outage data.
The site is one of a number of free online outlets utilizing Big Data that have become key sources of information for news sites and the public. Think FlightRadar24, which tracks every aircraft in the sky, or the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in the US.
The straightforward design of PowerOutage.US is nothing to write home about. However, aggregating all that data in one place is “not trivial,” explained Santiago Carlos Grijalva, a Georgia Tech professor of electrical engineering who studies the US power grid.
“It’s very substantial, right, because it’s very difficult to integrate all that data, to contact (the power companies), to partner with them. It’s an interesting effort,” he explained.
For Robinson, a goateed 32-year-old resident of South Portland, Maine, the growth of PowerOutage.US remains a bit of a surprise. Even now, he gets a thrill out of seeing the site’s name mentioned in his local Maine newspaper, on NPR or on TV news.
“It’s always like, ‘Holy sh*t, there’s my thing. I did that, I built that,’” he said.
That growth has also turned this side project into a much bigger undertaking. In November, he sold the site for a “good amount” to FindEnergy.com, a startup that provides electricity and energy data to consumers. He intends to focus more on the data and less on other aspects of the business.
Matt Hope, the co-founder of FindEnergy, said he wants to build out the site’s US, Canada and United Kingdom databases and even expand into mapping Europe’s power system. He feels “a lot of pressure” in taking the reins of a website so important in emergency situations, he said.
“There definitely is a level of responsibility because the data matters in those events when people are in danger potentially,” Hope said.
From Side Project to Data on 150 Million
To understand how the site works, you first have to grasp the US electric grid.
Unlike some other countries, the US electrical system is largely decentralized and made up of about 3,000 individual electric utilities, according to the US Energy Information Administration. There are private investor-owned utilities such as Pacific Gas and Electric in California; public utilities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority; co-ops such as Pedernales Electric Cooperative in Texas; and smaller utilities that dot more rural areas.
“(There’s a) wide variety of players,” Grijalva said. “It’s very diverse.”
In launching PowerOutage.US in 2016, Robinson started by putting together Maine’s leading power companies. He then expanded to the New England region, and after Hurricane Matthew in 2016, moved to add the southeastern United States.
He set up the site to automatically go to power company websites, pull in data on outages, aggregate it with other outage data and make it available to the public. States with high numbers of outages are color coded as yellow, orange or red, and users can click into a state to see the outages in more detail.
The site first started getting picked up by the news media, he said, when Hurricane Irma hit Florida in 2017, knocking out power to swaths of the region and sending the public to his site to understand the extent of the damage.
In the middle of 2017, a telecom company reached out to request access to the underlying data and offered to pay. Robinson built out an API for the company that provided access to the data, and he drew up a contract for payment. “I still have that first check I got from that company,” he said.
In the years since, this paid part of the business has grown and sustains the free map. Robinson said he left his regular job to focus full time on PowerOutage.US in 2021.
As of this month, PowerOutage.US tracks about 943 utilities, according to its website, a total that Robinson says accounts for about 94% or 95% of US customers. While most large utilities provide data to the site, some do not, including two large utilities in Arizona.
Utility crews work to restore electricity in Houston in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl on July 11, 2024.
The Decentralized US System
The technology that allows PowerOutage.US to work is based in part on the rise of so-called “smart meters” over the past two decades, according to Jay Apt, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, who has researched the reliability of the electric power grid.
Smart meters are devices that measure power usage and report remotely to both the power customer and utility, a development from the days when utilities sent out “meter readers” once a month to visually check customers’ electricity use.
With smart meters, power companies can, in real time, spot on a system map where an outage is and try to determine its likely cause. Their growing use as part of a “smart grid” was spurred by billions of dollars in federal grants included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009.
“That was a huge advance in the ability of power companies to respond to outages,” Apt said. “It was the smart meters that allowed the data that you see on PowerOutage.US.”
Robinson said the site is mutually beneficial for customers, power companies and third parties that pay for detailed data. For customers, it allows them to quickly see whether their own power outage is part of a broader issue.
For the power companies, the site enables their employees to focus on fixing the outage rather than answering customer calls, and it can help them coordinate and share resources with nearby power companies during a major event. A large utility that owned several smaller utility companies even came to Robinson with an unusual request.
“We have a parent company who has come to us for data because it’s easier to get the aggregated data from us than it was to go to all their children companies and get the data,” he said.
In addition, large companies with stores or equipment across the country use PowerOutage.US to track how a storm is affecting their business, while other businesses can use it to find a market for portable generators or solar equipment. Hope said he noticed some financial institutions even used their data for trading.
With a modest demeanor, Robinson told CNN he was proud of the site’s growth and excited that the sale of the company will allow him to go back to focusing on the data – what he called his “bread and butter.”
“I built this little thing and it became super useful to all kinds of people,” he said. “It’s just satisfying to know that I’ve helped in some way improve data access and data accuracy that it’s been useful for all kinds of people.”
