Hurricane power outage burden lands unequally: satellite evidence across 30 Atlantic storms

Hurricane-related outages affect millions, yet who loses power, how severely, and for how long remains poorly measured. Here we use satellite nighttime radiance to measure outage burden across 30 Atlantic hurricanes (2012–2024) and 156,032 tract-hurricane observations in 18 states. Decomposing outage burden into occurrence, severity and recovery, we find that occurrence disparities were the most robust: minority-status vulnerability was associated with 3.47 percentage points higher outage probability per 10-percentile-point increase. Severity disparities were positive and stronger among tracts that lost power, but attenuated after land-cover adjustment, indicating dependence on built-environment characteristics. Housing and transportation vulnerability was associated with slower recovery. Outages co-occurred with dangerous heat more often in high-minority tracts. Satellite monitoring can provide a utility-independent framework for tracking whether grid resilience investments reduce outage disparities.