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SIOUX FALLS, SD The monumental power failure in Texas caused by unseasonable cold showed how extreme weather can push an electric grid to the brink.
The average U.S. power customer loses electricity for 1.5 to 2 hours annually even before extreme weather events are taken into account, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. As the Texas experience showed, hurricanes, snowstorms, heat waves and other extreme weather events can make such outages dramatically worse.
Customers in South Dakota state experienced 4.92 hours without power in 2019 0.22 more hours than the national average of 4.7 hours in 2019, which is the most recent information available, according to the EIA.