JD Power’s 2025 report shows a clear shift: Long outages in the U.S. are rising sharply—from 8.1 to 12.8 hours since 2022—and in Southern states, outages now average over 18 hours. Nearly half of these outages come from extreme weather.
Layer on another emerging pressure: winter peaks. As heat pumps proliferate, regions like New England are beginning to strain the grid in the cold months, not the hot ones. The grid was built for August; it’s increasingly being tested in January.
What hurricanes and ice storms are doing in the South, dry-wind events, wildfires and PSPS are doing in the West: fewer outages overall, but far longer, more disruptive, more dangerous ones when they occur.
Athena Intelligence's partners work with utilities to reduce the areas of PSPS and their timing. Using a scalpel (as opposed to an axe) to determine where to take proactive planning steps to reduce the escalation of potential fires — reducing the cascading impacts that make long outages even harder to manage in an electrified, winter-peaking world.
Smarter wildfire prevention = fewer shutoffs