By Mike Nolan
ALBANY, N.Y. (Sept. 10, 2026) — Driven by increasingly severe weather events, power outages are costing the U.S. economy between $50 billion and $150 billion annually in direct losses and lost productivity.
New York ranks among the most affected states in the nation, with more than 18.3 million customer outages recorded during major weather-driven blackouts over the past decade.
A new tool being built by researchers at the University at Albany aims to give utility companies a head start on protecting and restoring the electric grid by predicting power outages before severe weather strikes.
The two-year project, funded by NASA, will pair researchers at UAlbany with peers at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Alabama in Huntsville to build an open-source outage prediction system.