Grid reliability · 2024 · 21 reporting utilities

Power outages in Colorado

The utilities that reported here serve 2,748,388 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 119 min without power in an ordinary year and 4.3 hr once major events are counted. Each figure comes only from the filers that published it, and the counts are below.

What it means

Why there are two numbers

Across the utilities that filed both figures, major events account for 54% of the outage time Colorado recorded once they are counted: 4.3 hr against 119 min without them, a factor of 2.2×. Solar panels alone do not help during an outage, because a grid-tied array shuts down when the grid does, so riding through one is a battery question. This figure will not answer it: it is an annual average across a utility’s customers, not the length or the load of any single outage. What it does say is how much of the outage time here arrives with major events rather than on ordinary days.

The comparison is drawn from the 21 utilities that filed both figures, which is all of them, so both sides of the ratio describe the same set of customers. The two headline figures above are averaged over everyone who filed each one, so dividing them would not give this number.

Ordinary year119 min28 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 21 filings

With major events4.3 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 21 filings

Interruptions a year1.1×Ordinary year; 1.4× with major events

The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Colorado’s figures is a customer-weighted average of the filings that carried that metric, not of the table as a whole: the ordinary-year average is built from 21 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 21 filings, out of 21 filings that published an outage figure at all. Those are the same utilities on both sides. A utility that filed without publishing a metric, or whose two major-event variants contradicted each other, is absent from that metric rather than counted as zero.

Reported interruption metrics for 2024, largest utility first.
Utility	Customers	Ordinary year	With major events	Interruptions
Public Service Co of Colorado	1,523,795	2.6 hr	5.9 hr	1.4×
City of Colorado Springs - (CO)	256,580	45 min	63 min	0.8×
CORE Electric Cooperative	178,763	74 min	3.5 hr	0.8×
United Power, Inc	114,202	77 min	77 min	1.2×
Black Hills Colorado Electric, LLC	100,052	101 min	5.4 hr	1.4×
City of Fort Collins - (CO)	79,990	11 min	11 min	0.2×
Mountain View Elec Assn, Inc	63,853	42 min	56 min	0.5×
Holy Cross Electric Assn, Inc	61,786	56 min	56 min	1.2×
Poudre Valley REA, Inc	55,762	74 min	5.4 hr	0.7×
City of Longmont	48,509	19 min	19 min	0.5×
La Plata Electric Assn, Inc	46,842	72 min	3.1 hr	1.0×
City of Loveland - (CO)	41,790	19 min	81 min	0.2×
Delta Montrose Electric Assn	37,555	96 min	2.6 hr	not reported
Yampa Valley Electric Assn Inc	28,698	3.9 hr	4.9 hr	1.9×
Mountain Parks Electric, Inc	22,847	85 min	2.5 hr	1.1×
Grand Valley Power	19,649	94 min	94 min	not reported
City of Fountain	17,628	18 min	18 min	0.1×
Empire Electric Assn, Inc	17,211	2.6 hr	2.6 hr	1.8×
San Luis Valley R E C, Inc	13,026	96 min	4.9 hr	0.9×
Southeast Colorado Power Assn	10,994	7.9 hr	11 hr	not reported
Y-W Electric Assn Inc	8,856	4.5 hr	4.5 hr	not reported

What this page is not

It is a state average of utility filings, not a measurement at any address. Each filing is itself an average over a whole service territory, so a rural feeder and a downtown network arrive here as one number, and nothing in this dataset says how far an individual address sits from it. Nothing here predicts a future year either, and a single severe storm can move a utility’s figure by an order of magnitude.

The methodology page states the sources, the definitions, and the limits. Back to the Grid Reliability Index

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861 reliability file, data year 2024, covering 2024-01-01 through 2024-12-31. The snapshot covers no later period.