It’s not terribly signal worthy imho. It’s obvious what are critical loads: finance, healthcare, telecom (local CO or your local datacenter, comms), government services such as first responders and dispatch, water/sewer. This is yet another excuse and data obfuscation to hide incompetence and less than good faith decisions.

ERCOT and utilities didn’t even to know which circuits not to shed to keep gas pipeline infra (compressor stations) running during the spring winter event.

Local permit data around electrical infra and ground truth from open data sources will take you far if you want to identify these loads. Folks answer a lot of questions they shouldn’t if you roll up with a hard hat, clipboard, and hi viz vest from your non descript pickup truck if you’re more bold.

I wish that power companies were required to publish outage information, at least down to the neighborhood level.

In my area the chance of an outage can vary considerably between one neighborhood and an adjacent neighborhood. It would be nice when considering buying a house to be able to know if it is one of the lower outage neighborhoods or not.

It's actually a federal protected secret for some industries like data centres.

yeah, this use case is really interesting