Power outage maps

Whenever the power goes out, there's a burst of search traffic by people to try to figure out what is going on and when the lights will be back on.

Lots of utility companies have outage management systems which provide some widely varied amount of information about what's going on - there's a bunch of vendors, no obvious standards being used, and even file formats and page styles are all over the place.  With hurricanes on their way, and dozens of different electric companies dealing with possible problems, it looked like a mess.  So I made a map.

View Larger Map

This map (incomplete now; notably missing the west coast and new england) has regions corresponding to power company service areas, more or less, and links from those regions direct to the outage reporting page.  It's a hack - you'd love something lovely which really put all of the live data on one page - but you live with the infrastructure you have, not the infrastructure you want to have.

--

As I said a bunch of vendors are working on these sorts of tools; here's a review of sorts.

The shiniest and nicest so far appears to be iFactor, which handles mapping for Con Edison (NYC), Progress Energy (Fla), Nebraska Public Power District and Entergy (New Orleans). The New Orleans system has had a tremendous workout with Gustav, and at some point the crush of queries made them take it offline; it went back online with limited information (ie. the utility doesn't know when things are going to be online again so that part of the system is disabled).  They are using Microsoft Virtual Earth for their base maps.

Comments

[JC]

Hi Edward,

How much will a solution like that cost with a vendor?

If you are going to do this yourself for a utility company, will you recommend Google Map or MS Virtual Earth?

Do you know if there is any cost to use either Google Map API or MS Virtual Earth to show live outage information?

Thanks,
Jimmy

[Edward]

Big power outage in New England because of an ice storm; I'll try to zoom in on some outage mapping if I can find it.

Bloomberg story here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aX.r38t1Jem0&refer=home

[Edward]

Here's the Connecticut power outage map:

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/12/connecticut-power-outage-map-12-december-2008-ice-storm-edition.html

which links through to the real time update.

I don't have an answer to Jimmy (JC) questions.