![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/jayden-smith.jpg\")
<\/p>\n Rawls College professors analyzed how power interruptions affect regional economic
\n growth and housing prices.<\/p>\n
\t\tCREATORS<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Most Texans who have resided in the state for the past five years will surely remember
\n the catastrophic winter freeze of February 2021 that lasted nearly nine days, burst
\n water pipes and left approximately 10 million people without power.<\/p>\n
As devastating as those billion-dollar disasters can be, they often occur beyond the
\n scope of any utility provider\u2019s control.<\/p>\n
What is likely to be treated with more annoyance than heartbreak are the power interruptions
\n that are not the fault of a hurricane or winter storm, but rather are part of a provider\u2019s
\n routine operations and disrupt countless day-to-day activities, risking billions of
\n dollars lost in home values and property taxes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Seeking to understand the societal impacts of the latter, Texas Tech University<\/a> researchers led investigations into how power interruptions affect regional economic Bradley Ewing<\/a> and Zachary Keeler<\/a>, professor and assistant professor of practice, respectively, of energy commerce & business economics<\/a> in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business<\/a>, spearheaded the effort.<\/p>\n Keeler highlighted that this work differs from similar studies by separating outages \u201cWe\u2019re one of the first studies that look at minor events, which we see in both studies They found that counties, especially rural, with shorter and less frequent outages The study on housing prices identified that normal operating interruptions negatively Additionally, for every increase by one standard deviation from the average number Not only were the projects a case of matching available data with their expertise \u201cIf we know how power reliability impacts housing prices, policymakers can consider Ewing and Keeler used data on power from 2013 to 2020 submitted by utilities and power The power reports detailed three aspects of reliability: the System Average Interruption Keeler acknowledged there are numerous ways power reliability and economic growth DML helps prevent the problems that arise when multiple independent variables, such It also addresses overfitting, when models can\u2019t make accurate conclusions or predictions The housing price study utilized several methodologies to check for consistent estimates Both investigations illustrate that power reliability matters, Keeler said, but the \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily have those answers,\u201d he added, \u201cbut we show that that might be There are direct and indirect effects, which the group will continue to investigate Regardless of the exact type of research, Keeler looks forward to communicating with \u201cI think, as scholars, we should try to bridge that gap as best as possible,\u201d he said.
\n growth and housing prices.<\/p>\n![\"Bradley](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/ewing-brad.jpg\")
![\"Zachary](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Keeler-Zachary.jpg\")
Bradley Ewing and Zachary Keeler<\/p>\n
\n lasting more than five minutes, known as Major Event Days (MEDs), from those without
\n MEDs resulting from non-major events.<\/p>\n
\n are the things that seem to matter the most. Those outages that are relatively more
\n avoidable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\n may experience positive employment growth and reliable power facilitates local business
\n success, linking reliability with better societal outcomes. Minor interruptions may
\n reflect an aging or overextended infrastructure, in addition to negatively impacting
\n business operations and resident well-being.<\/p>\n
\n impact prices in metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties, as well as both low-
\n and high-natural-disaster-risk counties, with the market already incorporating the
\n risks of MEDs. High-risk counties saw the largest effects.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n of minutes customers experience an outage, housing prices decreased by 0.25%, a statistically
\n significant figure as indicated by the study. Extrapolated to the total value of U.S.
\n homes at the end of 2022, a one-standard-deviation increase would lead to over $113
\n billion lost in home values and over $1 billion in property taxes lost each year<\/p>\n
\n and research interests in matters such as urban and regional economics, but they also
\n held the potential to shine a spotlight on steps to progress.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n that when making the decisions they need to make,\u201d Keeler said. \u201cHome buyers can then
\n factor in things like power reliability when figuring out how much they want to pay
\n for a house or where they want to locate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n marketers operating in counties in the Lower 48 states of the U.S. They also assessed
\n the changes in county-level employment and population growth from 2014 to 2019 and
\n annual housing prices for the economic growth and housing studies, respectively.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n Duration Index, measuring the number of minutes of interruption the average customer
\n experiences yearly; the System Average Interruption Frequency Index, or how many times
\n the average customer experiences an outage each year; and the Customer Average Interruption
\n Duration Index, which relates how many minutes it takes to restore service after an
\n interruption.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n can be affected by either outside factors or each other, which the study had to control
\n for using the cross-fit partialing-out lasso method, or a double machine learning
\n (DML) approach.<\/p>\n
\n as labor force participation rate or broadband access, are correlated and thus muddy
\n the picture in terms of determining a single variable\u2019s impact on the model results.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n due to learning from similar variables, by performing variable selection and regularization.
\n Regularization reduces features of models and limits variance by shrinking the sizes
\n of the explanatory variables\u2019 coefficients.<\/p>\n
\n and quality assurance. Beyond exploring the differences between urban and rural areas
\n and analyzing counties\u2019 various natural disaster risks, the study touched on the effects
\n of migration, such as local movers knowing more about a county\u2019s power reliability
\n than incomers.<\/p>\n
\n conversation should continue onto determining what can be done to be better at restoring
\n power quickly and preventing avoidable outages.<\/p>\n
\n an important consideration if you want your region to grow or if you want local housing
\n prices to increase because we see that there\u2019s this linkage there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n as they seek to analyze power reliability\u2019s impact on state-level gross domestic product
\n and income inequality.<\/p>\n
\n the larger, public audience, be it economic development officials or other stakeholders,
\n to transform ideas into tangible progress.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cWe want our research to have an impact.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rawls College professors analyzed how power interruptions affect regional economic growth and housing prices. CREATORS Most Texans who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[168,170,169],"class_list":{"0":"post-140059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lubbock","8":"tag-lubbock","9":"tag-lubbock-headlines","10":"tag-lubbock-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}