Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Electricity is essential for almost everyone: rich and poor, old and young. But when major storms hit, socio-economically disadvantaged communities often wait the longest to recover.

That’s not just a perception.

We analyzed data from more than 15 million consumers in 588 US counties who lost power when hurricanes made landfall between January 2017 and October 2020. The results show that poorer communities did indeed wait longer for the lights to come back on.

A 10 percentile decrease in socioeconomic status in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Social Vulnerability Index was associated with an average longer dropout of 6.1%. This equates to an average additional wait of 170 minutes before power is restored, and sometimes much longer.

Policy and utility implications

A likely reason for this disparity is captured by utilities’ standard storm recovery policies. Often, when restoring power after a power outage, these policies prioritize critical infrastructure first, followed by large commercial and industrial customers. They then try to restore as many households as possible as quickly as possible.

While this approach appears procedurally fair, these restoration routines appear to have the unintended effect of making vulnerable communities often wait longer for electricity to be restored. One reason may be that these communities are further away from critical infrastructure, or they are primarily in older neighborhoods where electrical infrastructure requires more extensive repairs.

The result is that households already at greater risk from severe weather – whether they are in flood-prone areas or living in vulnerable buildings – and households least likely to have insurance or other resources to help them recover are also likely to experiencing the longest storm-related power outages. Long outages can mean refrigerated food spoilage, no running water and delays in repairing damage, including delays in running fans to dry out water damage and prevent mold.

Our study covered 108 service regions, including utilities, cooperatives, and investor-owned public utilities. The differential impacts on poorer communities did not correspond to any particular storm, region, or individual utility. We also found no association with race, ethnicity or housing type. Only the average socio-economic level stood out.

How to make power recovery less biased

There are ways to improve restoration times for everyone, in addition to the necessary work to improve the stability of power distribution.

Policymakers and utilities can begin to reexamine energy restoration and energy infrastructure maintenance practices, such as replacing aging utility poles and tree pruning, with underserved communities in mind.

Energy suppliers already have detailed data on power consumption and network performance in their service regions. They can begin to experiment with alternative recovery routines that take into account the vulnerability of their customers in a way that does not materially impact the average recovery time.

For socio-economically vulnerable regions that are likely to experience prolonged outages due to their location and possibly aging energy infrastructure, utilities and policymakers can proactively ensure that households are well prepared to evacuate or have access to backup power sources.

For example, the U.S. Department of Energy announced in October 2023 that it would invest in the development of dozens of resiliency hubs and microgrids to help deliver local power to key buildings within communities when the broader electrical grid fails. Louisiana is planning several of these hubs, using solar energy and large-scale batteries, in or near underserved communities.

Policymakers and utilities can also invest in broader energy infrastructure and renewable energy in these vulnerable communities. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Justice40 program mandates that 40% of profits from certain federal energy, transportation and housing investments benefit underserved communities. This can help residents who need government help most.

Severe weather events are becoming more common as global temperatures rise. That increases the need for better planning and approaches that don’t leave low-income residents in the dark.

Chenghao Duan, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, also contributed to this article. This article, originally published on February 7, 2024, has been updated to reflect the increasing number of power outages caused by Hurricane Helene. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.