Transmission grid outage statistics extracted from a web page logging outages in Northeast America

Detailed outage data is foundational for the study of power transmission grid reliability and resilience, and particularly for dependent outages and rarer events, but there are very few such data sets that are published and freely accessible to all engineers and researchers. There are voluminous logs of scheduled and actual outages in a region of Northeast America available on the web. We show how to compress and process these logged data to obtain bulk statistics describing the outages, such as event size, propagation, and spread on the network. These statistics are very useful for calibrating and validating models of resilience to ensure realism, and in developing data-driven approaches.