Grid reliability · 2024 · 20 reporting utilities

Power outages in Oklahoma

The utilities that reported here serve 1,014,916 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 2.0 hr 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 45% of the outage time Oklahoma recorded once they are counted: 3.7 hr against 2.0 hr without them, a factor of 1.8×. 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 20 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 year2.0 hr26 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 20 filings
With major events3.7 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 20 filings
Interruptions a year1.3×Ordinary year; 1.6× with major events
The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Oklahoma’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 20 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 20 filings, out of 20 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.
UtilityCustomersOrdinary yearWith major eventsInterruptions
Public Service Co of Oklahoma579,031117 min3.1 hr1.3×
Oklahoma Electric Coop Inc64,79071 min89 min1.1×
City of Edmond - (OK)44,46182 min107 min1.3×
East Central Oklahoma Elec Coop Inc37,0902.8 hr4.8 hr1.4×
Canadian Valley Elec Coop, Inc27,5993.0 hr9.8 hr1.2×
Lake Region Electric Coop, Inc - (OK)26,481116 min5.7 hr1.1×
Central Rural Electric Cooperative, Inc24,360108 min3.3 hr1.1×
Cotton Electric Coop, Inc23,5943.7 hr5.9 hr2.3×
Kiamichi Electric Coop, Inc23,0135.5 hr7.9 hr2.4×
Stillwater Utilities Authority22,19158 min2.4 hr0.7×
Indian Electric Coop, Inc20,64364 min84 min0.5×
Cimarron Electric Coop19,77939 min80 min0.5×
Cookson Hills Elec Coop, Inc18,9782.3 hr6.7 hr0.8×
Southeastern Electric Coop Inc - (OK)17,4164.2 hr5.4 hr1.0×
City of Ponca City - (OK)15,87699 min2.4 hr1.0×
City of Claremore13,327104 min3.0 hr1.9×
Ozarks Electric Coop Corp - (AR)12,93068 min5.4 hr0.9×
Rural Electric Coop, Inc - (OK)12,7002.6 hr11 hr1.4×
Empire District Electric Co5,92888 min19 hr0.9×
Arkansas Valley Elec Coop Corp4,7292.3 hr3.3 hr1.4×

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.