168 – 168 - Risk Analysis and Related Topics
Studying Important Weather Factors in the 2021 Texas Power Outage Crisis
Mason Chen
Stanford OHS
The 2021 Texas power crisis was the costliest disaster in the state’s history. This presentation implements JMP outlier and cluster tools to uncover which weather indicators had the greatest effect. Air and dew point temperature were identified as the most crucial factors in the power outages as they directly affected the bursting of pipes. To compare the weather patterns across previous years, cluster sampling was used to collect 12 different variables for each day of February in Houston from 2012 to 2021. Although the Quantile Range Outliers detected that air temperature was the main outlier in 2021, the analysis assumed all weather variables were independent (but humidity depended on both air and dew temperature). The Principal-Component, Statistical Process Control Chart similarly showed inconclusive results, as the eigenvalues considered the situations across all 10 years instead of revealing the main causes specific to this year. Cluster Variables helped identify the most representative variables, and dew point (which could not be seen in the outlier analysis) was now observed in the SPC analysis which was aligned to the scientific research.