# 1. Introduction

After leaving behind a trail of destruction in the Caribbean, Hurricane Sandy struck New York on 29<sup>th</sup> October 2012. There, the storm claimed the lives of 53 people, destroyed thousands of buildings, and caused severe disruptions of public infrastructure, including water supply, transportation, and electricity. By some estimates over 2 million customers experienced power outages in the aftermath of the storm.

Just few years earlier, in 2007, Bangladesh was hit by one of the most powerful storms the country ever experienced. Cyclone Sidr formed in the central Bay of Bengal, and quickly strengthened to reach sustained wind speeds of over 260 km/h. The storm hit Bangladesh on November 15<sup>th</sup> 2007 and caused the deaths of around 3,400 people, according to the Government of Bangladesh (2008). The cyclone also led to one of the largest blackouts ever recorded: 75 million people lost access to power, which translated into 1.9 billion customer-hours of lost electricity services (Rhodium Group, 2018).

These experiences underline – not only the vulnerability of densely populated coastal areas to natural shocks – but more specifically the vulnerability of key lifeline infrastructure. Even in high-income industrialized economies electricity infrastructure can be heavily affected by natural shocks. Moreover, the data presented in this study show that the power outage due to Hurricane Sandy and Cyclone Sidr was by no means an isolated incident. Natural hazards are indeed the most frequent cause of electricity supply disruptions in the US, and the second most important cause in Europe. In contrast, in Bangladesh natural shocks account for a far smaller share of power outages – not because energy systems are more resilient, but because system failures and non-natural factors are so frequent that energy users experience daily outages. In other words, a fragile system is vulnerable not only to natural shocks, but also to a host of other stressors and shocks that include unmet demand, equipment failure, and accidents.

The 28 countries considered in this study cover about 1 billion people, and a wide range of geographies and climatic zone.<sup>1</sup> The US electricity network for instance consists of 275,000 km of high voltage transmission lines (>200 kV), almost 10 million km of low-voltage transmission lines, covering climatic zones from the Subarctic to the Subtropics, and serving over 325 million people (IEA, 2014). This means that its network elements – from generation to transmission and distribution – are exposed to a wide range of natural hazards, including tropical cyclones, tornados, wildfires, floods, winter storms, and droughts. The network is particularly dense in the Western mainland USA, a region that is frequently affected by storms – and outages.

In international comparison the USA have a high-quality electricity supply system. The electricity reliability index by the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2018) assess the risk of electricity supply interruptions and voltage fluctuations. According to this index, the United States ranked 26<sup>th</sup> in 2018 with a score of 6.2 on a scale from 1 (not reliable at all) to 7 (extremely reliable), out of 137 countries included in the study. While the US – expectedly – offers more reliable power supply than most developing countries, it ranks behind many of the developed economies in Europe considered in this study – such as France, the Netherlands, or Norway, which all score 6.8 or higher. This suggests that power supply interruptions are more common in the US than in other developed economies. The rest of this study will show that natural shocks (such as storms) are a key driver of these power supply interruptions.

> 1 This includes about 950 billion electricity end-users, considering a 75% electrification rate in Bangladesh.

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