A systematic review and typology of power outage literature: Critical infrastructure, climate change and social impacts

Thomas Ptak, Julie Brooks and Ryan Stock

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2025, vol. 218, issue C

Abstract: This systematic review offers a typology to more comprehensively understand contemporary power outage scholarship. A significant body of literature concerning critical infrastructure broadly adopt either a technocentric approach or engage engineering principles to model and assess standards of structural integrity, regulatory actions, and cascading risks emanating from outage events. Technocentric scholarship largely indicates how social considerations necessitate deeper investigations and require more detailed modes of analysis. Alternatively, scholarship focused on social vulnerability and human-centered impacts are often qualitative in nature or adopt mixed methodologies to mitigate gaps in analysis. Studies investigating outages driven by climate change either serve as a bridge between categories or are positioned either side of a thematic binary. This paper identifies and analyzes three main strands of power outage literature: critical infrastructure, climate change and social impacts. Further, the review identifies sub-categories which reveal limitations and lacunae in scholarship to date, while discussing potential avenues for actionable and interdisciplinary future research.

Keywords: Power outages; Infrastructure; Climate change; Social vulnerability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2025.115778

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