Grid reliability · 2024 · 36 reporting utilities

Power outages in North Carolina

The utilities that reported here serve 5,279,816 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 2.4 hr without power in an ordinary year and 25 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 91% of the outage time North Carolina recorded once they are counted: 25 hr against 2.4 hr without them, a factor of 10.6×. 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 35 utilities that filed both figures of the 36 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 hr20 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 35 filings

With major events25 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 36 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 North Carolina’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 35 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 36 filings, out of 36 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
Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC	2,211,457	2.8 hr	27 hr	1.2×
Duke Energy Progress - (NC)	1,616,285	2.4 hr	30 hr	1.2×
EnergyUnited Elec Member Corp	132,720	2.1 hr	7.1 hr	1.3×
Brunswick Electric Member Corp	112,592	31 min	44 min	0.6×
Jones-Onslow Elec Member Corp	87,495	45 min	2.1 hr	0.7×
Union Electric Membership Corp - (NC)	86,280	53 min	6.0 hr	0.7×
Fayetteville Public Works Commission	83,310	71 min	2.2 hr	1.0×
Blue Ridge Elec Member Corp - (NC)	79,753	93 min	101 hr	1.3×
Rutherford Elec Member Corp	76,515	5.8 hr	92 hr	1.1×
Greenville Utilities Comm	74,630	33 min	33 min	0.5×
Lumbee River Elec Member Corp	66,700	2.1 hr	4.7 hr	1.3×
Wake Electric Membership Corp	56,238	108 min	2.8 hr	1.5×
Town of High Point	47,285	65 min	79 min	0.7×
Carteret-Craven El Member Corp	42,647	70 min	104 min	0.8×
City of Wilson - (NC)	37,861	56 min	2.1 hr	0.8×
Piedmont Electric Member Corp	34,479	2.8 hr	6.6 hr	1.5×
City of Concord - (NC)	34,243	2.9 hr	2.9 hr	1.9×
Randolph Electric Member Corp	34,054	114 min	3.7 hr	1.4×
City of Gastonia - (NC)	31,366	97 min	23 hr	1.0×
City of Rocky Mount - (NC)	29,489	70 min	87 min	1.3×
Haywood Electric Member Corp	29,052	9.4 hr	160 hr	3.6×
Surry-Yadkin Elec Member Corp	28,552	3.5 hr	24 hr	1.6×
Town of Apex- (NC)	28,371	36 min	116 min	0.4×
Tri-County Elec Member Corp (NC)	26,981	112 min	112 min	1.1×
City of New Bern - (NC)	24,952	41 min	2.4 hr	0.6×
Central Electric Membership Corp. - (NC)	24,626	2.5 hr	7.4 hr	not reported
Tideland Electric Member Corp	24,062	2.6 hr	4.5 hr	1.8×
Pee Dee Electric Member Corp	21,793	3.1 hr	8.9 hr	2.4×
City of Statesville - (NC)	14,805	76 min	87 min	0.6×
Roanoke Electric Member Corp	13,706	108 min	2.1 hr	1.1×
City of Monroe - (NC)	13,288	18 min	22 min	0.3×
City of Albemarle - (NC)	12,505	27 min	41 min	0.2×
City of Kinston - (NC)	12,002	57 min	57 min	0.4×
Edgecombe-Martin County E M C	11,755	83 min	113 min	1.0×
New River Light & Power Co	9,097	18 min	5.1 hr	0.3×
Town of Huntersville - (NC)	8,870	not reported	4.0 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.