Electricity is essential to our communities' infrastructure. Water, waste, communication, and transit are all services that depend on electricity to function. Losing power is not just an inconvenience, but has the potential to be catastrophic to our infrastructure and put lives at risk.
Researchers need open-access methods to gather realistic data for power systems. Right now there is a lack of data describing how failures "grow" in power networks. Utility companies provide real time power outage data, but do not provide records of past outages to the public. There are also paid services that provide the data we are seeking, but are locked behind a paywall.
We are looking to create a power-utility scraper that takes the data provided by utility companies and saves it into a growing database. This service will be hosted on a website.
Dr. Mikhail Chester
Arizona State University
Professor, School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering
Dr. Chester is the Director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University where he maintains a research program focused on preparing infrastructure and their institutions for the challenges of the coming century. His work spans climate adaptation, disruptive technologies, innovative financing, transitions to agility and flexibility, and modernization of infrastructure management. He is broadly interested in how we need to change infrastructure governance, design, and education for the Anthropocene, an era marked by acceleration and uncertainty. He is co-lead of the Urban Resilience to Extremes research network composed of 19 institutions and 250 researchers across the Americas, focused on developing innovative infrastructure solutions for extreme events. He was awarded the American Society of Civil Engineer's early career researcher Huber price in 2017.
We are looking to create a power-utility scraper that takes the data provided by utility companies and saves it into a growing database. This service will be hosted on a website.
