Grid reliability · 2024 · 31 reporting utilities

Power outages in Kentucky

The utilities that reported here serve 2,258,979 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 2.4 hr without power in an ordinary year and 9.0 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 73% of the outage time Kentucky recorded once they are counted: 9.0 hr against 2.4 hr without them, a factor of 3.7×. 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 30 utilities that filed both figures of the 31 reporting here, 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 year2.4 hr19 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 30 filings

With major events9.0 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 31 filings

Interruptions a year1.2×Ordinary year; 1.8× with major events

The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Kentucky’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 30 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 31 filings, out of 31 filings that published an outage figure at all. Those two sets are not the same utilities, so the two columns cannot be compared filer by filer. 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
Kentucky Utilities Co	555,275	83 min	9.7 hr	0.8×
Louisville Gas & Electric Co	444,830	83 min	7.2 hr	0.8×
Kentucky Power Co	161,599	6.8 hr	21 hr	2.2×
Duke Energy Kentucky	152,297	92 min	2.2 hr	0.7×
Warren Rural Elec Coop Corp	74,727	2.5 hr	7.6 hr	1.7×
South Kentucky Rural E C C	72,517	5.0 hr	12 hr	2.2×
Owen Electric Coop Inc	66,763	2.1 hr	3.3 hr	0.9×
Blue Grass Energy Coop Corp	62,550	3.0 hr	9.9 hr	1.5×
Kenergy Corp	59,433	2.6 hr	6.2 hr	1.9×
Salt River Electric Coop Corp	57,242	2.2 hr	6.0 hr	1.6×
Jackson Energy Coop Corp - (KY)	53,698	4.6 hr	14 hr	2.1×
West Kentucky Rural E C C	40,472	3.5 hr	15 hr	1.9×
Nolin Rural Electric Coop Corp	38,164	56 min	3.3 hr	0.8×
City of Bowling Green - (KY)	31,532	22 min	73 min	0.2×
Meade County Rural E C C	31,499	98 min	5.8 hr	1.2×
Jackson Purchase Energy Corporation	30,772	113 min	5.3 hr	1.2×
Inter County Energy Coop Corp - (KY)	28,393	117 min	4.6 hr	1.2×
Taylor County Rural E C C	28,281	2.5 hr	3.9 hr	1.6×
Clark Energy Coop Inc - (KY)	27,723	4.5 hr	22 hr	1.6×
City of Owensboro - (KY)	27,519	113 min	2.5 hr	1.1×
Farmers Rural Electric Coop Corp - (KY)	26,880	2.6 hr	6.6 hr	1.4×
Tri-County Elec Member Corp (TN)	26,135	2.8 hr	6.2 hr	2.6×
Fleming-Mason Energy Coop Inc	26,110	3.6 hr	14 hr	1.7×
Cumberland Valley Electric, Inc.	24,367	8.4 hr	20 hr	3.5×
City of Paducah - (KY)	22,344	18 min	18 min	0.4×
City of Frankfort - (KY)	22,336	20 min	38 min	0.2×
Shelby Energy Coop, Inc - (KY)	18,445	3.0 hr	8.8 hr	1.3×
Grayson Rural Electric Coop Corp	14,894	8.2 hr	39 hr	3.4×
Big Sandy Rural Elec Coop Corp	12,595	8.8 hr	14 hr	3.7×
Henderson City Utility Comm	11,936	20 min	20 min	0.3×
City of Glasgow - (KY)	7,651	not reported	106 min	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.