Data on major power outage events in the continental U.S.

This paper presents the data that is used in the article entitled "A Multi-Hazard Approach to Assess Severe Weather-Induced Major Power Outage Risks in the U.S." (Mukherjee et al., 2018) [1]. The data described in this article pertains to the major outages witnessed by different states in the continental U.S. during January 2000-July 2016. As defined by the Department of Energy, the major outages refer to those that impacted atleast 50,000 customers or caused an unplanned firm load loss of atleast 300 MW. Besides major outage data, this article also presents data on geographical location of the outages, date and time of the outages, regional climatic information, land-use characteristics, electricity consumption patterns and economic characteristics of the states affected by the outages. This dataset can be used to identify and analyze the historical trends and patterns of the major outages and identify and assess the risk predictors associated with sustained power outages in the continental U.S. as described in Mukherjee et al. [1].