04/26/2023
By Kelly Craig
When: Thursday, May 11, 10 a.m.
Where: Zoom
What: "Power Outages and Social Vulnerability"
Who: Prof. Christine Crago (Department of Resource Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
A reliable electric power supply is essential to the functioning of modern society. Power outages impose a significant economic cost to society, businesses, and individual households, and climate change-induced severe weather is expected to further increase this cost. Despite the significant impact of power outages, there is a research gap pertaining to identifying national trends in power outages as well as identifying those most affected by these outages. In her group’s research, Prof. Crago examines the distribution of power outages in the United States. Using the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), they examine temporal and spatial trends for the years 2017-2020 at the county level. They also examine the relative severity of power outage experiences for environmental justice communities based on the criteria of poverty, English language limitations, and racial minority status. In this talk, Prof. Crago will examine their results, which underscore the need for equity in power system reliability.
About the Speaker:
Christine L. Crago is an associate professor in the Department of Resource Economics and the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her fields of research are energy and environmental economics. Her current research examines h income and racial disparities in power outage experiences and in adoption of renewable energy technologies, as well as household decision-making related to energy technologies. She is a core faculty member of ELEVATE, an NSF-funded Ph.D. training program emphasizing equity in the energy transition. Crago obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UMass, DCrago was a research associate at the Energy Biosciences Institute.