Hurricanes and Power System Reliability-The Effects of Individual Decisions and System-Level Hardening

Hurricanes produce significant, widespread, and often prolonged electrical-power outages. For example, Hurricane Irene caused more than 500 000 Long Island Power Authority customers to lose power and it took eight days to achieve 99% customer restoration. Individuals and businesses are heavily dependent on a continuous supply of electricity. Given this strong dependence on reliable electricity, individuals and private industries are increasingly putting collective pressure on regulators to require system hardening by utilities. In some cases, this has led to utility action. Conversely, many customers install a backup generator to guarantee electricity supply during disruptive events. These actions taken by individual customers affect their experiences in future storms, and are generally influenced by individuals' strength of preference for reliable power, their beliefs about the likelihood of losing power in the future, and the outcomes of their most recent experiences. However, individual action may come at the expense of collective action, whereby those who buy generators, often those with more resources available to purchase the generator, do not participate in the collective grievance, reducing the demand for overall system hardening. By using a validated power-outage forecasting model in conjunction with an agent-based model, we characterize how a community's likelihood of losing power in repeated hurricanes is affected by the complex interactions among individuals' behavioral responses in whether to engage in personal or collective action.