This is a very interesting business. Simple and appealing to a general user but apparently worth $1k/m for business users who want access to consolidated data via API.
I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!
Complex datasets are always in demand! I wish we'd gotten into something simpler, because in this specific case it's very high maintenance. The data sources constantly change and have no standard for reporting. We try to make it as simple as possible for people who need the information, so it's a lot of work on our side.
My local ISP shows power outages overlaid on their own service status map. I'm guessing it cuts down on support calls when they're down due to no power. (I suspect they get that data directly from PG&E.)
The use case is any business with dozens/hundreds/thousands of physical locations spread throughout the country. They need to keep track of adverse weather events, road closures, power outages, etc. If you have a bunch of franchises $1k is a drop in the bucket. Let's say one of your stores opens at 7am but the system reports a power outage at 4am. Now you have actionable information to deal with it before your boots on the ground even get there.
I've had several ideas sort of like this over the years in areas/industries where it hadn't been done yet, but I'm always somewhat scared of running into copyright law issues. In other words, the data isn't mine, but if I gather it, transform it, and repackage it, it would likely be useful to people and certainly more useful than in its current raw form. But again, the data came from elsewhere.
In this case, as someone else mentioned, they likely just scraped other states'/private power companies'/rural cooperatives' maps or websites to get the data. How is that not problematic?
I understand that larger companies do this all the time, but isn't the risk pretty large for smaller entities?
*Edit* - I see I didn't read far enough to see that you guys are saying that you are often working directly with the utility companies etc. But the question still stands. I understand that some things where data is pulled are just attempts to get paid for other people's data, but some are not - some, like this, legitimately add value via visualization, aggregation, and transformation. I'm talking about things like the latter case.
Patio11 actually had a really interesting podcast (on his old podcast) with the founder of StormPulse about why businesses and governments care about these sorts of feeds [0]
I can imagine that anything that involves logistics, moving people or things around.
Lack of electricity might disable something that's important to you, but over which you don't have direct control or precise information about.
Blackouts might affect only parts of a city, and I can see why having precise, real-time information about which parts of the city have power or not, is something really useful to re-route things around the problem.
Know some folks who used to work at Genscape. The whole business was selling live power generation data. They mostly accomplished it "hands-off" and without the permission of utilities.
If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.
Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.
when I worked in the IoT space this would have been a god send at that price, just so we could quickly answer if we had some large power outage occurring simultaneously with an outage.
Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task
Edit:
would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_
$1000 per month is what I used to charge to a corporate card for generic SaaS products without filing a purchase order. It's not a lot. Even if your business only makes $1M/yr in revenue, $1000 is 1/83rd of monthly revenue. If anything I think they're priced too low.
We buy similar services for even more than 1k per month. Keep in mind that these aggregators also smooth over changes in the underlying apis. Dealing with 15-30 individual api vendors is a lot of hassle in itself.
You'll never get unicorn status with this, but it's probably pretty easy to get 20 customers to sign up. You'll probably cap out between 1k-10k customers if you start to really push it.
How does the US do this? In Canada, everything is so splintered. Open Data is available at various levels (municipal, provincial), but it's in different formats, many government bodies don't expose anything, and it's all very .. uncooridnated.
But this is not the first time I've seen data from the US which feels so well organized. Is the secret sauce the data/providers, or is the creator of this site just very good at organizing a big mess?
Hopefully they get power back soon. I'm one of the people behind the website, so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out! Especially if you're interested in the data :)
Where I live the City helpfully^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H performatively lets you see where the power is out, but provides no historical information. They pay VertiGIS to provide this service. At least today (I checked, it was something else last time I checked). Woot!
"Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information, it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know. If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there, then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.
The second important consideration for a democratically governed entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not? Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is required.
Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other viewpoints on this aspect.
On a practical level I have systems which are always on and logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more reliable way of collecting information about outages, without relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber" and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.
Does the US map have a different definition for "power outage" than the Canada/UK map on the same website? Unless I've missed news about a tornado or hurricane, the outage statistics for the US seem rather extreme to me.
We had a strong storm come through yesterday afternoon and night. I didn't lose power at home but I'm not surprised that around 85k in my state did. I saw quite a few down trees and leaning power poles this morning.
Part of the problem was that, at least here, we got 4" of rain earlier this week. This storm brought more rain, high winds, and a lot of lightning.
According to this report [1] the average time between blackouts in 5 years in the UK, vs 3½ years in the USA and less than 12 months in Canada. (Page 8.)
One note I haven't seen mentioned here yet, we got a lot of rain last week prior to this storm.
Here in Alabama we got around 4.5" in my part of the state, that's nearly our average for an entire month. The ground was already very soft before this storm, making trees more susceptible to high winds. We also had a lot of lightning here last night.
I'm actually surprised I didn't lose power. I'm in a fairly rural area with mostly above ground power lines and lots of trees within falling distance of power poles and lines.
I'm in Georgia. There was a bad thunderstorm front that came through last night and briefly took out the power to my building. High winds and tornado watches across much of the state. We really need to bury our power lines.
It's very typical of this season as we experience several rounds of rapid temperature fluctuations between the 60s and 70s and the 20s and 30s. Late winter and early spring typically bring storms and tornadoes to our region.
It's funny to see everyone rush outside donning springtime apparel and then be hit with the coldest days of the season just after. And it happens every year. "Fake spring", we call it.
We've got a forecast for snow this upcoming Wednesday too! Fingers crossed.
Like the other Georgia commenters, had a severe storm starting at 4AM trailing off at 6 and ending at 7. We lost power for about 20 minutes, all my essential gear stayed up on battery power. I’m on underground power but we have trees down in Atlanta and a lot of people lost power for a few hours.
What’s amusing is this is all on the heels of another discussion about electrical grids in the US vs Europe and a lot of points made are exactly what we experienced. Our grid can be technically as competent as anywhere but a giant storm sending a tree through a transformer or distribution line is going to make for a bad day.
South of Atlanta we had a tornado warning around 5am. Several downed trees and power outages but I haven't heard of any actual tornadoes that touched down in my area yet.
Not too bad, but here in Memphis most power lines are old and above ground, so any moderate system coming through will knock out a significant chunk of the grid.
Airplanes keep falling out of the sky and infrastructure keeps failing as Trump fires more and more FAA, DOE, and FEMA employees, and hands the reigns of government over to Musk and Putin.
But just wait until Trump pardons Jeffrey Skilling, and puts him in charge of the Department of Energy Office of Electricity, to overhaul grid modernization, cybersecurity, and resilience running the national power grid, the Energy Information Administration, to provide power grid data and analysis, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to regulate interstate electricity transmission, wholesale power markets, and reliability.
why not have a more granular heatmap as the main viz? coloring by state boundaries is really unintuitive and often misleading, even without Mercator projection criticisms.
It depends on what your goal is, I suppose. If it's just to see the organization of data by administrative boundary, this is fine. For the people this company is selling to, that's probably even the ideal.
However for us in the cheap seats, we most likely as a group want to see number of people impacted. For that, administrative boundaries are the inverse of what we want given administrative boundaries tend to shrink as population increases.
Just goes to show the gap between B2C and B2B. In this case it seems this company knows their target audience, and it's not us.
Live power outage data is intentionally obscured by power providers as a matter of public safety. They report outages, and numbers of affected customers, etc. But efforts are made to ensure the locations of those customers cannot be too easily weaponized. It remains a question how effective those efforts are.
[+] [-] iandanforth|1 year ago|reply
I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!
[+] [-] vonadz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] medmunds|1 year ago|reply
https://www.monkeybrains.net/map/
[+] [-] neither_color|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dawnchorus|1 year ago|reply
I've had several ideas sort of like this over the years in areas/industries where it hadn't been done yet, but I'm always somewhat scared of running into copyright law issues. In other words, the data isn't mine, but if I gather it, transform it, and repackage it, it would likely be useful to people and certainly more useful than in its current raw form. But again, the data came from elsewhere.
In this case, as someone else mentioned, they likely just scraped other states'/private power companies'/rural cooperatives' maps or websites to get the data. How is that not problematic?
I understand that larger companies do this all the time, but isn't the risk pretty large for smaller entities?
*Edit* - I see I didn't read far enough to see that you guys are saying that you are often working directly with the utility companies etc. But the question still stands. I understand that some things where data is pulled are just attempts to get paid for other people's data, but some are not - some, like this, legitimately add value via visualization, aggregation, and transformation. I'm talking about things like the latter case.
[+] [-] anitil|1 year ago|reply
[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/08/kalzumeus-podcast-4-sto...
[+] [-] brookst|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] barake|1 year ago|reply
If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.
Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.
[+] [-] lovich|1 year ago|reply
Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task
Edit: would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] javier2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hx8|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] luxurytent|1 year ago|reply
But this is not the first time I've seen data from the US which feels so well organized. Is the secret sauce the data/providers, or is the creator of this site just very good at organizing a big mess?
[+] [-] vonadz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m3047|1 year ago|reply
"Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information, it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know. If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there, then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.
The second important consideration for a democratically governed entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not? Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is required.
Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other viewpoints on this aspect.
On a practical level I have systems which are always on and logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more reliable way of collecting information about outages, without relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber" and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.
[+] [-] lisper|1 year ago|reply
https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/
[+] [-] jeroenhd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _heimdall|1 year ago|reply
Part of the problem was that, at least here, we got 4" of rain earlier this week. This storm brought more rain, high winds, and a lot of lightning.
[+] [-] Symbiote|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... (via https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/reports/q3-2019/)
[+] [-] thedougd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 827a|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|1 year ago|reply
Really interesting data, particularly when you compare the very low level of outages in Canada/UK compared with the US.
[+] [-] niceice|1 year ago|reply
States with 10 million plus customers that only have a few thousand without power.
Incredible achievement if you think about it.
[+] [-] jdlyga|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _heimdall|1 year ago|reply
Here in Alabama we got around 4.5" in my part of the state, that's nearly our average for an entire month. The ground was already very soft before this storm, making trees more susceptible to high winds. We also had a lot of lightning here last night.
I'm actually surprised I didn't lose power. I'm in a fairly rural area with mostly above ground power lines and lots of trees within falling distance of power poles and lines.
[+] [-] echelon|1 year ago|reply
It's very typical of this season as we experience several rounds of rapid temperature fluctuations between the 60s and 70s and the 20s and 30s. Late winter and early spring typically bring storms and tornadoes to our region.
It's funny to see everyone rush outside donning springtime apparel and then be hit with the coldest days of the season just after. And it happens every year. "Fake spring", we call it.
We've got a forecast for snow this upcoming Wednesday too! Fingers crossed.
[+] [-] the_plus_one|1 year ago|reply
[1]: https://www.wdbj7.com/2025/02/12/36k-plus-virginians-lose-po...
[+] [-] Moto7451|1 year ago|reply
What’s amusing is this is all on the heels of another discussion about electrical grids in the US vs Europe and a lot of points made are exactly what we experienced. Our grid can be technically as competent as anywhere but a giant storm sending a tree through a transformer or distribution line is going to make for a bad day.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Willingham|1 year ago|reply
https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/02/16/live-updates-tor...
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] b0b_d0e|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] warmedcookie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|1 year ago|reply
But just wait until Trump pardons Jeffrey Skilling, and puts him in charge of the Department of Energy Office of Electricity, to overhaul grid modernization, cybersecurity, and resilience running the national power grid, the Energy Information Administration, to provide power grid data and analysis, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to regulate interstate electricity transmission, wholesale power markets, and reliability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling
[+] [-] leeoniya|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cheschire|1 year ago|reply
However for us in the cheap seats, we most likely as a group want to see number of people impacted. For that, administrative boundaries are the inverse of what we want given administrative boundaries tend to shrink as population increases.
Just goes to show the gap between B2C and B2B. In this case it seems this company knows their target audience, and it's not us.
[+] [-] meta_x_ai|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bluechair|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sdenton4|1 year ago|reply
I assume that's lots of air conditioning? Or perhaps downstream effects of appliance regulations?
[+] [-] bookofjoe|1 year ago|reply
Here is a link to a video I took in my back yard about 45 minutes ago when the wind was fierce: my power went out about 10 minutes later.
https://youtube.com/shorts/N1rcUk-1kNM?si=1s8uCdvfqa5VmrXL
[+] [-] freeopinion|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] techolic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] booi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alsoforgotmypwd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thunkingdeep|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] bee_rider|1 year ago|reply