This is a very interesting business. Simple and appealing to a general user but apparently worth $1k/m for business users who want access to consolidated data via API.
I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!
Complex datasets are always in demand! I wish we'd gotten into something simpler, because in this specific case it's very high maintenance. The data sources constantly change and have no standard for reporting. We try to make it as simple as possible for people who need the information, so it's a lot of work on our side.
Would love to hear more about the demand for data like this. I have a “complex data” startup that’s likely similar in complexity (totally different area though) and I’d love to learn about who I might be able to sell the data to.
My local ISP shows power outages overlaid on their own service status map. I'm guessing it cuts down on support calls when they're down due to no power. (I suspect they get that data directly from PG&E.)
The use case is any business with dozens/hundreds/thousands of physical locations spread throughout the country. They need to keep track of adverse weather events, road closures, power outages, etc. If you have a bunch of franchises $1k is a drop in the bucket. Let's say one of your stores opens at 7am but the system reports a power outage at 4am. Now you have actionable information to deal with it before your boots on the ground even get there.
I've had several ideas sort of like this over the years in areas/industries where it hadn't been done yet, but I'm always somewhat scared of running into copyright law issues. In other words, the data isn't mine, but if I gather it, transform it, and repackage it, it would likely be useful to people and certainly more useful than in its current raw form. But again, the data came from elsewhere.
In this case, as someone else mentioned, they likely just scraped other states'/private power companies'/rural cooperatives' maps or websites to get the data. How is that not problematic?
I understand that larger companies do this all the time, but isn't the risk pretty large for smaller entities?
*Edit* - I see I didn't read far enough to see that you guys are saying that you are often working directly with the utility companies etc. But the question still stands. I understand that some things where data is pulled are just attempts to get paid for other people's data, but some are not - some, like this, legitimately add value via visualization, aggregation, and transformation. I'm talking about things like the latter case.
Patio11 actually had a really interesting podcast (on his old podcast) with the founder of StormPulse about why businesses and governments care about these sorts of feeds [0]
Certainly grocery stores don't need to ask someone else if their freezers are getting power, no? They would have monitors, people and computers, that are doing this job.
Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...
Supermarkets pretty much all have generators on site now. There's enough value in frozen and refrigerated inventory that it's worth it. Small grocery stores probably not.
I can imagine that anything that involves logistics, moving people or things around.
Lack of electricity might disable something that's important to you, but over which you don't have direct control or precise information about.
Blackouts might affect only parts of a city, and I can see why having precise, real-time information about which parts of the city have power or not, is something really useful to re-route things around the problem.
Know some folks who used to work at Genscape. The whole business was selling live power generation data. They mostly accomplished it "hands-off" and without the permission of utilities.
If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.
Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.
when I worked in the IoT space this would have been a god send at that price, just so we could quickly answer if we had some large power outage occurring simultaneously with an outage.
Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task
Edit:
would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_
$1000 per month is what I used to charge to a corporate card for generic SaaS products without filing a purchase order. It's not a lot. Even if your business only makes $1M/yr in revenue, $1000 is 1/83rd of monthly revenue. If anything I think they're priced too low.
We buy similar services for even more than 1k per month. Keep in mind that these aggregators also smooth over changes in the underlying apis. Dealing with 15-30 individual api vendors is a lot of hassle in itself.
You'll never get unicorn status with this, but it's probably pretty easy to get 20 customers to sign up. You'll probably cap out between 1k-10k customers if you start to really push it.
How does the US do this? In Canada, everything is so splintered. Open Data is available at various levels (municipal, provincial), but it's in different formats, many government bodies don't expose anything, and it's all very .. uncooridnated.
But this is not the first time I've seen data from the US which feels so well organized. Is the secret sauce the data/providers, or is the creator of this site just very good at organizing a big mess?
An open data commitment across gov agencies was an explicit commitment and project started in 2013 during the Obama administration.
“On May 9, 2013, President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. Making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government.”
The annual GovHack hackathon was supported by many agencies, leading to a strong prize pool and people from various agencies on hand looking for teams who over the weekend had done cool things with their data (specially if it was public interest). Some projects were further funded coming out of the hackathons.
i think the creator is good. I think they are just scraping different power company outage maps. If you look in some places there's 0 data because the power company doesn't have a true outage map
Hopefully they get power back soon. I'm one of the people behind the website, so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out! Especially if you're interested in the data :)
Where I live the City helpfully^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H performatively lets you see where the power is out, but provides no historical information. They pay VertiGIS to provide this service. At least today (I checked, it was something else last time I checked). Woot!
"Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information, it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know. If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there, then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.
The second important consideration for a democratically governed entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not? Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is required.
Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other viewpoints on this aspect.
On a practical level I have systems which are always on and logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more reliable way of collecting information about outages, without relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber" and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.
Perhaps they have improved now, but in the major winter storms of 2-3 years ago, we were regularly frustrated by how PG&E seemed to be spending more time on their innovative ways of reporting outages, but not actually fixing outages.
If your power is out, the "estimated restoration time" is a complete guess. We used to enjoy how it used to jump forwards 24 hours at exactly 6pm every day, during our 8-day outage.
Does the US map have a different definition for "power outage" than the Canada/UK map on the same website? Unless I've missed news about a tornado or hurricane, the outage statistics for the US seem rather extreme to me.
We had a strong storm come through yesterday afternoon and night. I didn't lose power at home but I'm not surprised that around 85k in my state did. I saw quite a few down trees and leaning power poles this morning.
Part of the problem was that, at least here, we got 4" of rain earlier this week. This storm brought more rain, high winds, and a lot of lightning.
According to this report [1] the average time between blackouts in 5 years in the UK, vs 3½ years in the USA and less than 12 months in Canada. (Page 8.)
The UK regulator introduced the Interruptions Incentive Scheme in 2002 to encourage distribution networks to reduce customer interruptions and minutes lost. It triggered a large wave of investment in network automation (remote switching, auto reclosers etc.)
So basically the difference between 9s is investment/cost.
At least here (Canada), utils push all of their costs to end-users & IIUC have an incentive to have high capex/low opex networks because of regulated return.
As a Canadian residential electrical customer, we pay a lot in base fees from what I hear relative to US customers. Sure it's more reliable, but tbh, it's not worth spending much to get 5 9s (5 mins of downtime a year) vs 4 9s (50 minutes/yr). Heck, even 500 minutes/yr would be fine for me.
But commercial/industrial users won't feel the same way, and managed to successfully spread the cost of adding 9s among users that largely don't care.
Readit News
I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!
Deleted Comment
https://www.monkeybrains.net/map/
I've had several ideas sort of like this over the years in areas/industries where it hadn't been done yet, but I'm always somewhat scared of running into copyright law issues. In other words, the data isn't mine, but if I gather it, transform it, and repackage it, it would likely be useful to people and certainly more useful than in its current raw form. But again, the data came from elsewhere.
In this case, as someone else mentioned, they likely just scraped other states'/private power companies'/rural cooperatives' maps or websites to get the data. How is that not problematic?
I understand that larger companies do this all the time, but isn't the risk pretty large for smaller entities?
*Edit* - I see I didn't read far enough to see that you guys are saying that you are often working directly with the utility companies etc. But the question still stands. I understand that some things where data is pulled are just attempts to get paid for other people's data, but some are not - some, like this, legitimately add value via visualization, aggregation, and transformation. I'm talking about things like the latter case.
[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/08/kalzumeus-podcast-4-sto...
Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...
If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.
Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.
Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task
Edit: would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_
Deleted Comment
But this is not the first time I've seen data from the US which feels so well organized. Is the secret sauce the data/providers, or is the creator of this site just very good at organizing a big mess?
“On May 9, 2013, President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. Making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government.”
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/open
I know about this because the Australian government then followed and worked on doing the same.
Data.gov became a central place to access and even request that departments open specific data sets and in more formats.
https://data.gov
https://data.gov.au
The annual GovHack hackathon was supported by many agencies, leading to a strong prize pool and people from various agencies on hand looking for teams who over the weekend had done cool things with their data (specially if it was public interest). Some projects were further funded coming out of the hackathons.
https://govhack.org/about
Year on year ongoing commitment to open data in government got us to here.
It was a great long term initiative furthering values of cizitzen engagement, open data and open government.
https://poweroutage.com/ca/
FYI on your LLC page has “queries” spelled “qurries”. Not sure if it’s intentional or not though.
"Performatively": yes. If you can't see historical information, it's performative, it misses the historical case which is the important market. If you're there and the power's out, you know. If you can do something about it in realtime, you will; otherwise you will wait until the power comes back on and disaster recovery kicks in: From when to when? For how long? If you're not there, then go directly to disaster recovery. That's my opinion, and I'm not changing it.
The second important consideration for a democratically governed entity would be: are we equally served? If not, why not? Retrospective information for the entire stakeholder group is required.
Too much ado is made of "security", and that historical information is somehow a threat to operational security. If the power is out now, the live info is the impacted targets of opportunity right now (or the ones to phone / smish when the power comes back on); if the power was out in the past, what's the threat? Are adversaries going to pre-position in areas where outages are predictable due to some foreseeable conditions? Then maybe the City should preposition resources, too. I welcome other viewpoints on this aspect.
On a practical level I have systems which are always on and logging with sufficient granularity so I know when the power went out... and when it came back on. I would think that telemetry from locations within the service area would be ultimately a more reliable way of collecting information about outages, without relying on the utilities which can't be relied on (outside of a contractual arrangement). This telemetry could be active, or passive: geolocating web browser and other internet activity (even pinging or SYNs) would likely do an adequate job, I'm sure that stationary resources could be identified in the dataset. I'm sure this is colored by the fact that I'm an "internet plumber" and telemetry and observability is what I do for a living.
https://pgealerts.alerts.pge.com/outage-tools/outage-map/
https://secure.comed.com/FaceBook/Pages/outagemap.aspx?ipid=...
https://www.etrviewoutage.com/map?state=TX
If your power is out, the "estimated restoration time" is a complete guess. We used to enjoy how it used to jump forwards 24 hours at exactly 6pm every day, during our 8-day outage.
https://outagemap.georgiapower.com/
1: https://www.pacificpower.net/outages-safety.html
https://stormcenter.oncor.com
Part of the problem was that, at least here, we got 4" of rain earlier this week. This storm brought more rain, high winds, and a lot of lightning.
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... (via https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/reports/q3-2019/)
Really interesting data, particularly when you compare the very low level of outages in Canada/UK compared with the US.
At least here (Canada), utils push all of their costs to end-users & IIUC have an incentive to have high capex/low opex networks because of regulated return.
As a Canadian residential electrical customer, we pay a lot in base fees from what I hear relative to US customers. Sure it's more reliable, but tbh, it's not worth spending much to get 5 9s (5 mins of downtime a year) vs 4 9s (50 minutes/yr). Heck, even 500 minutes/yr would be fine for me.
But commercial/industrial users won't feel the same way, and managed to successfully spread the cost of adding 9s among users that largely don't care.
States with 10 million plus customers that only have a few thousand without power.
Incredible achievement if you think about it.