Every year power outages cost billions of dollars and affect millions of people. In the U.S., historical data show that between 2000 and 2016, 75% of the outages (in terms of duration) were caused due to severe weather events. Due to climate change and aging of infrastructures, these weather-related events are getting more frequent. To mitigate the risk of economic losses from severe weather induced power outages, utilities need to invest heavily for building resilience against these events. This research has established a framework for risk-based decision making for identifying optimal risk reduction strategies to minimize the economic impact of severe weather induced power outages. The framework determines the economic impacts of severe weather induced power outages in terms of loss of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for a state and utilizes a Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) based optimization technique to identify the optimal scope of different strategies which will maximize the benefits from them. The benefit has been defined as the reduction of expected GDP loss due to implementation of risk reduction strategies. The framework requires the users to identify strategies, their feasible scope, and cost. This has been illustrated through an example. The proposed framework can be effectively used by the investor-owned utilities for getting their resilience building projects approved from state utility regulatory commissions.

每年停电造成数十亿美元的损失，并影响数百万人。在美国，历史数据显示，在2000年至2016年之间，有75％的中断（以持续时间为单位）是由于恶劣天气事件引起的。由于气候变化和基础设施老化，这些与天气有关的事件变得越来越频繁。为了减轻由于恶劣天气引起的停电造成的经济损失的风险，公用事业需要大量投资以增强抵御这些事件的能力。这项研究建立了一个基于风险的决策框架，用于确定最佳的风险降低策略，以最大程度地减少恶劣天气引起的停电对经济的影响。该框架根据某州的国内生产总值（GDP）的损失来确定恶劣天气引起的停电的经济影响，并利用基于效益成本分析（BCA）的优化技术来确定将最大程度地发挥作用的不同策略的最佳范围从中受益。收益被定义为由于实施降低风险战略而减少的预期GDP损失。该框架要求用户确定策略，可行范围和成本。通过一个示例对此进行了说明。拟议的框架可以由投资者所有的公用事业有效地使用，以使其抵御能力建设项目获得国家公用事业监管委员会的批准。