Power interruptions caused by severe weather continue to challenge electric co-ops across the country. Many teams need clear guidance on weather and power outages and how to reduce risk before the next storm hits.
Preparing for storms means protecting crews, safeguarding electrical infrastructure, and ensuring communities stay connected. Severe weather pushes distribution systems to their limits, and understanding how and why failures occur helps co-ops take proactive steps that reduce outages and improve readiness across their service areas.
Explore the advantages of professional-grade weather intelligence for Utilities through the TempestOne system.
What Causes Power Outages?
Weather remains the most common cause of power outages, accounting for about 83% of outages in the United States. This affects electrical equipment, vegetation, and access for repair crews. The most common weather-related large blackouts include:
- 14% caused by wind and rain. High winds can topple trees into power lines. Intense rainfall can weaken soil and cause treefall, leading to extended weather power outages.
- 11% caused by lightning. Lightning threatens both transmission and distribution infrastructure.
- 5% caused by ice storms. Heavy snow and ice weigh down utility poles and wires, increasing the chance of breakage and a loss of power.
- 4% caused by hurricanes/tropical storms: In coastal or storm-prone regions, tropical systems deliver powerful winds and flooding that limit crew mobility and increase restoration times.
- 2% caused by tornadoes. Tornadoes pose a significant risk to utility infrastructure with their violent winds.
Even heat events strain transformers and increase peak load, which can lead to equipment faults under prolonged stress.
Knowing what the most common cause of power failure is across your service area helps you prioritize vegetation management, asset upgrades, and storm-response procedures. With clearer insight, electric co-ops can better position crews, protect critical equipment, and reduce outage durations for members.
Strengthen your weather risk assessment process with insights from our comprehensive guide.
How Electric Co-Ops Can Prepare For Weather Power Outages
Electric co-ops can strengthen grid resilience by focusing on preparation strategies that directly address the patterns behind modern weather-driven outages. Research shows that most customer outage time comes from damage to distribution lines, which are often affected by fallen trees, wind, heavy precipitation, ice, and snow.
Meanwhile, recent national outage analysis reveals that long-duration outages increasingly coincide with multiple overlapping severe weather events, with heavy rain, extreme heat, and tropical cyclones among the most common weather conditions seen alongside extended service disruptions.
This combination of aging infrastructure and more intense weather means co-ops must prepare for both single hazards and complex, multi-hazard events that can prolong restoration. Enhancing field readiness, improving weather awareness, and reinforcing weak points in the system all help reduce outage duration and improve reliability for members.
Ways electric co-ops can prepare for weather power outages include:
- Strengthen vegetation management practices: Tree and limb failures remain a leading cause of distribution outages during storms. Shorter trimming cycles, proactive clearing around historically problematic spans, and improved vegetation risk mapping help reduce equipment damage and keep lines clear.
- Reinforce distribution infrastructure in high-risk areas: Studies show long outages often overlap with heavy precipitation, extreme heat, snow, or combinations of these hazards across many regions of the country. Hardening poles, upgrading aging conductors, and improving substation protections in these zones can reduce failure rates and speed restoration.
- Use selective undergrounding where it is cost-effective: While widespread undergrounding is expensive, targeted use in areas with frequent treefall, high wind exposure, or repeated storm damage can reduce outage frequency. Co-ops can evaluate where undergrounding provides long-term reliability gains that outweigh costs.
- Adopt smart grid technologies for faster detection and response: Modernizing system controls gives operators better visibility during storms. Sensors, automated switches, and advanced monitoring tools help crews identify failures quickly and isolate problem areas, reducing downtime and improving safety.
- Integrate real-time hyper-local weather monitoring with TempestOne: Because many outages now result from overlapping hazards, co-ops need accurate, local weather insights. TempestOne delivers real-time lightning, wind, rainfall, heat, and storm alerts tied to specific assets or service zones. This helps teams adjust operations, mobilize crews early, and make safer decisions during rapidly changing conditions.
- Improve maintenance using risk-based approaches: Traditional time-based maintenance can leave vulnerable equipment in service too long. A reliability-centered approach focuses on asset condition and risk levels, helping co-ops prioritize upgrades where they will have the greatest impact on reducing weather-related failures.
- Plan for complex weather events, not just single hazards: Many counties experience outages during multiple severe weather events occurring at the same time. Incorporating multi-hazard scenarios into emergency plans, training, and equipment staging improves readiness for events that escalate quickly.
- Strengthen and pre-coordinate mutual assistance agreements: When storms cause widespread outages, mutual aid accelerates restoration. Pre-established agreements, shared planning exercises, and clear resource commitments ensure that support arrives quickly when conditions allow.
- Improve communication with members before and during severe weather: Extended outages are becoming more common, and clear, timely communication helps members stay safe and prepared. TempestOne alerts can be incorporated into outreach to give communities more accurate expectations as storms approach.
TempestOne: A Professional Weather Risk Solution
Weather will always be a challenge, but having the right tools helps electric co-ops make smarter, safer decisions. The TempestOne for Utilities gives utilities access to hyper-local observations, AI-powered forecasts, and real-time alerts across service territories. With tools like the TempestOne Console and Daily Situational Awareness Tool, crews can monitor wind, lightning, rainfall, heat, and wildfire indicators in one place.
TempestOne supports faster, more accurate operational planning by showing impacts as they develop. Co-ops can track storm evolution, prepare response teams, and reduce the likelihood of major outages. Reliable weather intelligence also helps protect workers by identifying hazardous conditions like high winds or active lightning zones during field operations.
Preparing for weather and power outages requires dependable information. TempestOne delivers the insight needed to improve safety, reduce downtime, and increase resilience across your grid. Learn how TempestOne can support your operations and explore the tools designed for professional utility needs.