Power Infrastructure Resiliency and Maintenance Planning: The Socioeconomic Impact of Disruptions to North Carolina Power Infrastructure

A community's overall resilience depends on the resilience of its infrastructure as well as its social and economic institutions. Each of these institutions are typically evaluated and modeled as separate entities and assessed individually to illustrate a community's resilience to extreme events. While there has been work dedicated to how vulnerable populations are disproportionally impacted by extreme weather events, very little has been done to model how infrastructure systems and their day-to-day failures impact the socioeconomically vulnerable, and to what extent. Power utility construction planning, not only in terms of generation expansion and resiliency, but also in terms of public welfare, offer great opportunities for investigation and improvement. It has been theorized that energy justice can offer a decision-making tool that can assist energy planners and consumers in making more informed energy choices. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of an ongoing study that aims to understand how the socioeconomically vulnerable are impacted by power infrastructure failure in North Carolina. This paper describes an ongoing study that aims to identify (1) location specific trends of failed power infrastructure and (2) the North Carolina counties and associated socioeconomic factors that are disproportionally affected by failure events in terms of the duration of failure events.