If you believe that power outages are becoming more frequent – you’re not alone. A report released last August by the White House entitled: Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resiliency to Weather Outages, found that during 2012 there were approximately 680 outages due to severe weather, significantly more than occurred annually between 2005 to 2009. Analysis of these outages by Dr. Massoud Amin of the University of Minnesota provided some additional details when he showed that since 1999 blackouts in the Northeast averaged 214 minutes and 92 minutes annually in the Midwest. These U.S. figures compare to an average of 4 minutes per event in Japan.

Power outages are expensive. A study by Hugh Byrd, Professor of Architecture at the University of Lincoln, UK, and Steve Matthewman, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, found that blackouts annually cost U.S. businesses around $180B in lost revenues.