Grid reliability · 2024 · 38 reporting utilities

Power outages in Minnesota

The utilities that reported here serve 2,520,604 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 91 min without power in an ordinary year and 3.7 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 59% of the outage time Minnesota recorded once they are counted: 3.8 hr against 91 min without them, a factor of 2.5×. 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 36 utilities that filed both figures of the 38 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 year91 min36 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 36 filings

With major events3.7 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 38 filings

Interruptions a year0.9×Ordinary year; 1.3× with major events

The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Minnesota’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 36 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 38 filings, out of 38 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
Northern States Power Co - Minnesota	1,361,168	110 min	5.1 hr	1.1×
Connexus Energy	146,552	30 min	3.0 hr	0.3×
ALLETE, Inc.	138,546	120 min	120 min	1.3×
Dakota Electric Association	116,395	17 min	25 min	0.3×
East Central Energy	67,713	84 min	3.0 hr	0.5×
Otter Tail Power Co	63,290	2.4 hr	2.6 hr	1.1×
Rochester Public Utilities	60,557	43 min	102 min	0.7×
Wright-Hennepin Coop Elec Assn	56,021	24 min	45 min	0.3×
Lake Country Power	51,383	3.1 hr	6.2 hr	1.5×
Crow Wing Cooperative Power & Light Comp	47,712	74 min	2.0 hr	0.7×
Minnesota Valley Electric Coop	47,453	42 min	61 min	0.5×
Lake Region Electric Cooperative - (MN)	29,815	102 min	5.0 hr	1.0×
Stearns Cooperative Elec Assn	28,745	57 min	2.2 hr	0.6×
People's Cooperative Services	23,916	57 min	2.2 hr	0.6×
Beltrami Electric Coop, Inc	22,150	96 min	118 min	1.2×
Freeborn Mower Electric Cooperative	21,302	50 min	86 min	0.5×
City of Moorhead - (MN)	21,210	not reported	9 min	not reported
Shakopee Public Utilities Comm	20,529	8 min	8 min	0.1×
MiEnergy Cooperative	16,317	68 min	101 min	0.6×
Mille Lacs Energy Cooperative	15,976	2.6 hr	4.0 hr	1.2×
Runestone Electric Assn	15,225	52 min	68 min	0.5×
City of Elk River	13,466	10 min	42 min	0.1×
City of Anoka	13,004	40 min	40 min	0.4×
Itasca-Mantrap Co-op Electrical Assn	12,594	107 min	2.5 hr	1.4×
City of Owatonna - (MN)	12,489	27 min	66 min	0.5×
Steele-Waseca Cooperative Electric	12,001	41 min	41 min	0.5×
City of Austin - (MN)	11,853	7 min	8 min	0.1×
City of Alexandria - (MN)	10,692	4 min	4 min	0.1×
Willmar Municipal Utilities	10,171	not reported	34 min	not reported
Meeker Coop Light & Power Assn	9,450	99 min	99 min	1.0×
Brainerd Public Utilities	8,344	96 min	96 min	1.0×
Federated Rural Electric Assn	6,981	77 min	77 min	0.9×
City of Marshall - (MN)	6,944	1 min	1 min	0.0×
South Central Electric Assn	5,944	70 min	72 min	0.9×
Agralite Electric Coop	5,397	68 min	68 min	1.0×
Minnesota Valley Coop L&P Assn	5,361	2.5 hr	2.5 hr	0.8×
Sioux Valley SW Elec Coop	3,900	20 min	20 min	0.8×
Heartland Power Coop	38	52 min	52 min	0.7×

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.