Grid reliability · 2024 · 14 reporting utilities

Power outages in Virginia

The utilities that reported here serve 1,256,266 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 4.1 hr without power in an ordinary year and 16 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 74% of the outage time Virginia recorded once they are counted: 16 hr against 4.1 hr without them, a factor of 3.9×. 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 13 utilities that filed both figures of the 14 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 year4.1 hr4 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 14 filings

With major events16 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 13 filings

Interruptions a year1.6×Ordinary year; 2.2× with major events

The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Virginia’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 14 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 13 filings, out of 14 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
Appalachian Power Co	550,129	5.7 hr	29 hr	1.6×
Rappahannock Electric Coop	180,578	3.1 hr	5.0 hr	1.8×
Northern Virginia Elec Coop	177,139	62 min	95 min	0.8×
Shenandoah Valley Elec Coop	99,837	3.8 hr	8.0 hr	2.3×
Southside Electric Coop, Inc	59,338	5.2 hr	6.5 hr	2.8×
Central Virginia Electric Coop	39,366	5.8 hr	5.8 hr	2.6×
Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative	31,997	4.6 hr	6.0 hr	2.2×
Kentucky Utilities Co	29,557	2.4 hr	34 hr	1.3×
Northern Neck Elec Coop, Inc	20,696	2.8 hr	not reported	2.0×
City of Manassas - (VA)	16,625	28 min	56 min	0.6×
Bristol Virginia Utilities	15,954	36 min	8.8 hr	0.3×
City of Salem - (VA)	13,519	27 min	27 min	0.2×
Prince George Electric Coop	13,201	91 min	4.7 hr	not reported
Powell Valley Electric Coop	8,330	69 min	8.5 hr	3.7×

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.