Grid reliability · 2024 · 9 reporting utilities

Power outages in Nebraska

The utilities that reported here serve 748,658 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 70 min without power in an ordinary year and 12 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 90% of the outage time Nebraska recorded once they are counted: 12 hr against 70 min without them, a factor of 10.0×. 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 9 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 year70 min44 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 9 filings

With major events12 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 9 filings

Interruptions a year0.6×Ordinary year; 1.2× with major events

The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Nebraska’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 9 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 9 filings, out of 9 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
Omaha Public Power District	403,157	86 min	20 hr	0.7×
Lincoln Electric System	151,839	19 min	3.1 hr	0.3×
Nebraska Public Power District	93,975	74 min	74 min	0.7×
Norris Public Power District	28,825	3.3 hr	3.4 hr	1.6×
City of Grand Island - (NE)	27,115	8 min	12 min	0.3×
City of Fremont - (NE)	16,688	18 min	18 min	0.2×
City of Hastings - (NE)	13,960	12 min	30 min	0.1×
Midwest Electric Member Corp - (NE)	6,805	81 min	81 min	0.5×
Southwest Public Power Dist	6,294	2.0 hr	3.5 hr	1.1×

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.