By Gail Kendall

T
his article explores the possible relation-
ship between electric power outages and
market deregulation in the United Kingdom
and the United States. Two significant factors
that could increase the risk of outages are the
potential for increased in-grid congestion due
to long-distance wheeling of power and the possibility of ad-
verse changes in the resources devoted to maintenance, up-
grade, and new construction of transmission and distribution
facilities. In the United States in recent years, we have seen an
explosion of wholesale trading and wheeling of power and a
marked decline in the construction of new transmission ca-
pacity, despite a slow but steady growth in population and
electric power load. Other factors associated with deregula-
tion could help reduce the risk of outages, in particular, the in-
creased focus of energy providers on customer satisfaction.
The relationship between outages and deregulation may be
rather complicated, as in the case of the recent outages in Cali-
fornia. In this article, I examine the history of electric power
outages in the United Kingdom and the United States, before
and after market deregulation, to gain insight into the vul-
nerabilities of electric power grids to outages.
Electric power outages remain a fact of life in both the de-
veloping and industrialized worlds. They can be momentary
or last for days. They may affect only a few customers, or
they may plunge entire cities into darkness. They may be im-
posed by system operators, as in rolling brownouts due to
insufficient power capacity, or consequential to uncontrol-
lable factors, as in outages associated with storm damage to
power lines and towers.
The costs of outages have grown from lost opportunity,
inconvenience, and potential danger to include a growing
amount of economically significant wastage of material (and
associated labor) in uninterruptible stages of complicated
processing, as well as additional labor involved in clearing
and restarting systems of many kinds. In the industrialized
and developing worlds alike, business customers with sig-
nificant vulnerability to power outages often find or create a
local technical solution to provide continuous power in the
event of an outage.

Kendall (kendall@clp.com.hk) is with the CLP Research Institute, 1/F, 147 Argyle St., Mongkok, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

0272-1708/01/$10.00©2001IEEE
December 2001 IEEE Control Systems Magazine 33

Power Outage Data Sources
D ata for outages in the United Kingdom are avail-
able for 15 different electric utilities from the
U.K. Office of Gas and Electricity Markets
(OFGEM) Web site at http://www.ofgem.gov.uk/
docs2001/dtp_report.pdf for the years 1990-11 through
1999-00 (business year basis) [1]. The performance data
can also be obtained in spreadsheet format through the
OFGEM publications page at http://www.ofgem.gov.uk/
public/pub2001.htm. This time span covers the period of
deregulation in the United Kingdom. These data are statisti-
cal in nature and represent important measures of electric
power reliability, including interruptions per 100 custom-
ers, minutes of outage per customer, and voltage com-
plaints per 1000 customers. The trends appear to convey
some good news about reliability.
In the United States, electric power outage data are
generally available from several sources, including Web
site http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/
html/appendixb.html for the Department of Energy’s
Energy Information Administration (EIA) (for 1999 data,
f o r e x a m p l e ) [ 2 ] a n d We b s i t e h t t p : / / w w w.
nerc.com/dawg/database.html for the North American
Electric Reliability Council (NERC) [3]. These two sources
generally give similar data, including the date and time of
an outage, the utility involved, the region affected, the
quantity of load dropped, the number of customers
affected, the duration of the outage, and some information
about the nature of the event. These two data sets each
contain events not listed in the other data set. In general,
the EIA database contains more events, and the NERC
database gives more information about the events. The
narrative data in the NERC (and also the EIA) databases are
sufficient to identify factors such as equipment failure or
severe weather (or a combination of both!) that may have
contributed to an outage. Establishment of precise cause
is beyond the scope of most of the narratives. Both
databases are extremely valuable sources of information
and insight.
In both databases, a report of a single event may be
missing certain data elements such as the amount of load
dropped or the number of customers affected. In the
NERC database, the amount of load dropped is given for
the majority of the reported events, whereas the number
of customers affected is given for less than half the
reported events. In the EIA database, the number of
customers affected is reported more frequently than the
amount of load dropped. In this database, the 1994 data
are incomplete and the 1995 data are not available in the
standard reports.
It is important to note that both data sets cover periods
during which the process of market deregulation was
unfolding; in fact, the process cannot be said to be
complete today. Therefore, the long-term impacts of
power market deregulation on power outages remain to
be seen.
34 IEEE Control Systems Magazine
Customer tolerance for outages appears to be declin-
ing in the industrialized world. Public response to the
1999 Chicago outage was strong and irate. Even in the
case of equipment failures in severe weather, the public
has little tolerance for outages of significant duration. In
the United States, government agencies have convened
meetings and commissioned studies on the reliability of
the electric power system.
Electric Power Grids as Complex
Interactive Networks
Electric power grids are a prime class of complex interac-
tive networks. Cascading failures in complex interactive
networks are a national security concern for our critical
energy, communications, information, and transporta-
tion infrastructures.
Complexity of Electric Power Networks
Often continental in scale, electric power systems reach
virtually every home, office, factory, and institution in de-
veloped countries and have made remarkable, if remark-
ably insufficient, penetration in developing countries
such as China and India. Once “loosely” interconnected
networks of largely local systems, electric power grids in-
creasingly host large-scale, long-distance wheeling of
power from one region to another. Likewise, the connec-
tion of distributed resources, primarily small generators
at the moment, is growing rapidly. The extent of
interconnectedness, like the number of sources, con-
trols, and loads, has grown with time. In terms of the
sheer number of nodes, as well as the variety of sources,
controls, and loads, electric power grids are among the
most complex networks made.
Interactions in Electric Power Networks
Interregional wheeling of electric power is just one exam-
ple of the interactions among contiguous parts of electric
power grids. Perhaps the best evidence of the interactive
nature of electric power grids is the occasional outage
that sweeps across a large geographic region. The result-
ing loss of load may far exceed the loss of supply, leaving
generators with no means of getting available power to
customers. The interregional interactions on electric
power grids are such that some of the biggest power out-
ages in history were triggered by seemingly minor events
occurring far from the areas ultimately affected. In elec-
tric power, the regions are not only interactive, but also
interdependent. Electric power grid operations are also
dependent on the smooth operation of other networks,
including telecommunications and power markets, as
well as an extensive network of computers used in net-
work operations. These networks are also largely de-
pendent on reliable electric power. Hence, we think of
these networks as interdependent. Like complexity, elec-
December 2001
tric power network interdependency appears 120
to be growing with time.

Interruptions per 100

100
Global trends toward interconnectedness,

Customers
80
privatization, deregulation, economic develop-
ment, accessibility of information, and the con- 60
15-Utility
tinued technical trend of rapidly advancing in- 40 Average
formation and telecommunication technologies 20
all suggest that the complexity, interactivity, 0
and interdependence of infrastructure net- 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998
Reporting Year
works will continue to grow.
The growth of complexity, interactivity, and Figure 1. U.K. trend for electric power interruptions, 1990-1999.
interdependency among fundamental societal
infrastructure networks, such as energy, trans- 250
portation, communication, and computation,

Minutes Lost per

has given rise to serious concerns about the re- 200

Customer
liability of these infrastructures. Efforts at criti- 150
cal infrastructure protection in the United
100 15-Utility
States and internationally provide evidence of Average
these concerns. Although many of these efforts 50
focus on the dependence of various networks
0
on information system networks, there are ba- 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998
sic concerns about the other kinds of interde- Reporting Year
pendencies as well.
Figure 2. U.K. trend for customer minutes lost, 1990-1999.
There are also concerns that deregulation,
and the sometimes resultant confusion over re-
Customer in 1999-2000

sponsibility for power system reliability and up- 250

Minutes Lost per

grades, may increase the likelihood of power 200

outages. Individual
150 Utilities
100 Average
Historical Outages Data 50
All Utilities
Historical Incidence of Outages
0
in the U.K. 0 50 100 150 200 250
Historical outage data for the United Kingdom Ten-Year Average Minutes Lost per Customer from 1990/1991
are presented in Figs. 1 through 3. The trend in to 1999/2000
interruptions per 100 customers is shown in Figure 3. Recent U.K. trend for customer minutes lost for 15 utilities.
Fig. 1. These data have been averaged over the
15 utilities, with each utility’s data weighted
by its number of customers. It appears that
y = Number of Outages with Dropped Load

1990 was a difficult year and that outage fre- 40

quencies have generally been lower through- 35
Greater Than or Equal to x

out the remainder of the 1990s. There appears

30
to be a slight downward trend from about 90
to about 80 interruptions per 100 customers, 25

but the annual variations are also of this order 20

of magnitude. 15
The trend in minutes lost per customer is
10
shown in Fig. 2. These data have also been aver-
aged over the 15 utilities, with each utility’s data 5
weighted by the number of its customers. Once 0
again, it appears that 1990 was a very difficult 100 1,000 10,000 100,000
year and that the net durations of outages have x = MW of Load Dropped (Log Scale)
been lower throughout the remainder of the Two Years Before and After FERC Order Date
1990s. In this case, there appears to be a slight Squares: 4/24/94-4/23/96 Diamonds: 4/24/96-4/23/98
downward trend from about 100 to about 75
minutes lost per customer. Figure 4. U.S. trend for electric power load outages, 1994-1998.

December 2001 IEEE Control Systems Magazine 35

 Fig. 3 shows the most recent data for min-
utes lost per customer, as a function of the pre-
y = Number of Outages with Dropped Load
40
ceding ten-year average, for each of the 15
35 utilities. All 15 utilities did better in 1999-2000
Greater Than or Equal to x

30 than their own average over the preceding ten

25
years. However, there is quite a range of varia-
tion among the utilities, from less than 50 min-
20
utes lost per customer to over 100 minutes lost
15 per customer.
10

5
Incidence of Electric Power
Outages in the United States
0
1,000 10,000 100,000 Electric power outage data for the United States
100
are represented in a variety of ways in Figs. 4
x = MW of Load Dropped (Log Scale) through 6.
Three Years Before and After FERC Order Figs. 4 and 5 show NERC outage data as a
Squares: 4/24/93-4/23/96 Diamonds: 4/24/96-4/23/99 function of amount of load dropped. The y-axis
represents a count of the number of outages
(during the period specified) for which the load
Figure 5. U.S. trend for electric power load outages, 1993-1999. dropped was equal to or greater than x. This is a
standard way of comparing the incidence of
more severe events when data for lesser
impact events is not readily available.
y = Number of Outages with Number

Squares, 1990-1993 Diamonds, 1996-1999

180 Normally, for large datasets in which the
of Customers Dropped > x

160 counts on the y-axis vary by a few orders

140 of magnitude, these are shown on log-log
120 scales. The incidence of y (number of
100 events of magnitude x or larger) adverse
80 events (such as power outages) with re-
60 spect to the magnitude x (such as size of
40 load dropped) of the events can often be
20 described as a power law:
0
1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000 10,000,000
log( y ) = A – B log( x ),
x = Number of Customers Dropped
where A and B are constants. This rela-
Figure 6. U.S. trend for electric power customer outages, 1990-1993 and 1996-1999. tionship would be linear on a log-log
graph. Because the outage counts here
were fairly low, only the dropped load scale is
16 shown logarithmically.
Equipment Fig. 4 shows data for two years before and af-
14 ter the date of the Federal Energy Regulatory
Equip. and Env.
12 Commission (FERC) order on deregulation (24
Number of Outages

April 1996), and Fig. 5 shows data for three

10
years before and after the date of the order. A
Env.
8 comparison of these two figures shows the im-
portance of considering an adequate set of
6
data before making a conclusion as to whether
Env. and Wkrs. Wkrs. and Equip. the frequency or severity of outages are chang-
4
All 3
Workers ing with time. In Fig. 4, with just four years of
2
data (two years before and two years after the
0 FERC order), it appears that outages were be-
3 Years Before and After the 4/24/96 FERC Order
coming more frequent with the onset of dereg-
ulation. In Fig. 5, with six years of data (three
Figure 7. Factors associated with major U.S. outages, 1993-1999. years before and three years after the FERC or-

36 IEEE Control Systems Magazine December 2001

der), it appears that, on average, the frequency
of outages of a given load size was about the
16
same in the three years after deregulation com- Fault, Short, Flashover,
14 Misoperation
pared with the three years before deregulation. Damaged or Iced

Number of Outages
These charts clearly show that variations in 12
the annual number of outages reported by 10 Failure
NERC can be quite significant. The magnitude 8
of variations exceeds the expected increase 6
due to United States load growth of approxi- 4
mately 2% per year. Loss of
2 Generation
The EIA database contains far fewer inci- 0
dents of outages with dropped load greater
3 Years Before and After the 4/24/96 FERC Order
than 100 MW in 1998 and 1999 than in 1996 and
1997. Reference materials indicate that the re-
porting requirements have remained the same.
Figure 8. Equipment factors associated with major U.S. outages, 1993-1999.
It is not clear whether this is a trend (which
would be good news) or whether this is within
the range of variation due to weather, etc.
The EIA data for outages with more than 25
2000 customers affected is shown in Fig. 6. Data Weather, Trees, and Animals
Number of Outages

20
are shown for two periods: 1990 to 1993 and
1996 to 1999. Data for 1994, 1995, and 2000 are
15
not available. Curiously, the number of outages
affecting more than 2000 customers was about 10
the same for both periods. It is quite evident,
however, that the outages affecting 50,000 to 5
Earthquakes and Fires
200,000 customers were reported at a greater Sabotage
frequency in the more recent years as com- 0
pared with the early 1990s. Conversely, in the 3 Years Before and After the 4/24/96 FERC Order
early 1990s, the outages affecting 5,000 to
50,000 customers were reported at a greater
Figure 9. Environmental factors associated with major U.S. outages, 1993-1999.
frequency than in recent years. Outages affect-
ing more than a million customers tended to
occur very rarely and at similar frequencies during both singly or in combination with equipment factors) than in the
periods. Although the frequency of outages affecting 2000 earlier period.
or more customers was about the same in the two periods, Further analysis was done of the types of equipment and
the data indicate a greater number of affected customers in environmental factors associated with outages. Factors re-
more recent years. lated to types of equipment are identified in Fig. 8. These
data include events in which only equipment factors were
Factors Associated with U.S. Outages mentioned, as well as data for which equipment and other
The NERC outage narratives were analyzed to identify as-
factors were mentioned. If two types of equipment factors
sociated equipment, environmental, and worker factors.
were listed in the same report, the event was “split,” half to
A comparison was made of the incidence of associated
one type and half to the other, so that the total count of out-
factors in the three-year pre- and post-FERC-order peri-
ages with equipment factors would come out the same. At
ods. For some of the outages, none of these factors were
this level of data, we are dealing with fairly small numbers,
specified.
and it is difficult to say much about trends with time. Equip-
In Fig. 7, we see that equipment and environmental fac-
ment fault (or misoperation), damage, and failure have all
tors are those most commonly mentioned. Factors associ-
ated with employees, whether in normal or maintenance/re- been listed in a significant number of outage events.
pair operations, are seldom mentioned. The relative fre- The types of environmental factors associated with out-
quency of these factors is qualitatively the same in the pre- ages are identified in Fig. 9. It is clear from the data that
and post-FERC-order periods. In both periods, equipment weather factors were reported more often in the post- FERC-
factors were mentioned more often than environmental fac- order period than in the period preceding the order. It is also
tors alone, and combined equipment and environmental clear that weather factors are mentioned much more fre-
factors were significant. In the more recent period, environ- quently than other kinds of calamities (earthquake and fire)
mental factors appeared to be mentioned more often (either or sabotage.

December 2001 IEEE Control Systems Magazine 37

Figure 10. Major U.S. outages by region, 1993-1999.

In Fig. 10, counts of NERC-reported outages are given for Discussion

the various regions for the three-year period before (listed
first) and after (listed second) the FERC order. Once again,
the counts are down to sufficiently low numbers that it is dif-
ficult to comment on any trends. The figure does suggest
some recent outage problems in the Northeast.
The data examined seem to indicate some tentative good
news: deregulation need not mean an increase in electric
power outages. The U.K. data show very steady measures in
both the frequency and the duration of outages. It appears
that progress toward greater reliability can be made in both

38 IEEE Control Systems Magazine December 2001

and that progress can be made more readily in shortening
outage time than in reducing the incidence of outages.
Even in the United States, which entered the deregula-
tion process a bit later, we see that the frequency of outages
and the load dropped need not rise, as they appeared to do
in the initial two years following deregulation.
It is worth noting the tendency observed in the EIA data
for the number of customers affected by an outage to be
larger in more recent years. This could be due to greater
population densities on the infrastructure, as well as to
greater interdependence of one grid area on another. The
latter reason, greater interdependence among adjacent
power system areas, is a serious con-
cern and deserves thoughtful study
and creative research for solutions. Once interconnected networks of local
The identification of factors associ-
ated with outages, such as equipment systems, electric power grids now host
failure and weather, is interesting but
may be subject to misinterpretation. If
large-scale, long-distance wheeling of
the incidence of reporting of weather power from one region to another.
factors increases, does it mean that
the weather was worse, or that the sys-
tem was more vulnerable to the weather? The energy-con-
suming public is showing increasing intolerance for
weather-related outages of long duration. Similarly, custom-
ers have little sympathy for companies whose equipment
misoperates or fails due to neglect or personnel error. It is
clear that an increase in reliability will mean increased ro-
bustness in the face of severe weather and individual equip-
ment problems. Although much can be done to harden
equipment against weather and maintain equipment against
unintended outages, much can also be done in the area of in-
telligent system operation when equipment fails or
misoperates for any reason.
The period of time for which data were analyzed in this
article preceded a series of outages in California. The recent
California outages were not due to system instabilities or
component failures, but rather to insufficiency of available
power in the area. These outages were imposed rather than
inadvertent. This type of outage was relatively rare during
the period studied.
As the recent California experience indicates, the rela-
tionships among regulatory processes and system reli-
ability can be quite intricate, with effects emerging years
afterwards. The long-term impact of power market dereg-
ulation on power system stability will be seen in the com-
ing years.
Conclusions
To date, it appears that deregulation itself has not resulted
in a lasting increase in the incidence of power outages in the
United Kingdom and the United States. This is good news, at
least for the near term. The long-term effects of deregulation
on investment in power supply, transmission, and distribu-
tion, and the implications for outages, remain to be seen.
December 2001 IEEE Control Systems Magazine
For those outages for which some information has been
provided about the nature of the events, equipment and
weather problems are the two predominant associated fac-
tors. Improvements in system reliability will require greater
robustness in the face of individual component failures or
misoperation and greater resistance to damage or
misoperation in harsh weather. This implies both greater re-
dundancy and faster, more intelligent control. Cost consid-
erations will place a premium and emphasis on shared
redundancy, brought online by intelligent controls, much as
power reserves are increasingly shared in competitive mar-
kets today.
None of the major power outages studied here was due to
a failure in telecommunications or information networks.
This does not mean, however, that electric power systems
are not vulnerable to disturbances in these systems, partic-
ularly as interdependence grows. On the other hand, wide-
spread power outages can bring down other critical
infrastructure systems, including wire-based communica-
tions and computation.
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges contributions by
Massoud Amin and Richard Lordan of EPRI during an earlier
phase of this work. The author also thanks John Makens of
DOE EIA for providing outage data and Karla Stryker of MIT
for organizing the data.
References
[1] Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (ofgem). (Jan. 2001). Report on distri-
bution and transmission performance 1999/2000. [Online]. Available http://
www.ofgem.gov.uk/docs2001/dtp_report.pdf, and associated spreadsheet,
“VUMU4BAA,” available http://www.ofgem.gov.uk/public/pub2001.htm
[2] Department of Energy (DOE), Energy Information Administration (EIA).
(Jan. 2001). Appendix B, major disturbances and unusual occurrences. Elec-
tric Power Monthly [Online] and back issues, available http://www.eia.doe.
gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/html/appendixb.html
[3] Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, “Table A1, Ma-
jor disturbances and unusual occurrences in U.S. electric power systems,” in
Electric Power Annu., 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993.
[4] American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Disturbances Analysis
Working Group (DAWG) Database. Available http://www.nerc.com/dawg/
database.html and in the NERC publication, System Disturbances.
Gail Kendall was Professor of the Practice of Mechanical
Engineering at MIT and is now Managing Director, China
Light and Power Research Institute in Hong Kong.
39