Real-Time Power Outage Alert & Community Hub

People search 'power outage near me' to find outage status, but results are fragmented across utility websites and social media. Build a crowdsourced real-time outage tracker that aggregates utility data, shows affected areas on a map, provides ETA for restoration, and lets users report/discuss outages in their community.

Extreme weather frequency is climbing, and grid stress from EV adoption and data center load is making outages more common in previously stable regions — the search volume for outage-related queries has grown meaningfully alongside this. The closest incumbent is Poweroutage.us, which already aggregates utility data and maps affected customers, so differentiation would need to come from the community/discussion layer or faster data refresh, not the core map. At $1k–5k/month, the revenue math only works through display advertising or a freemium alert tier, both of which require significant traffic to matter — and traffic here is spiky, spiking during storms and going quiet otherwise, which makes sustainable ad revenue hard to model. The biggest risk is that utility APIs are inconsistent, frequently gated, or outright unavailable, meaning the data quality problem that makes this idea appealing to users is also the hardest technical constraint to solve reliably.