Grid reliability · 2024 · 21 reporting utilities

Power outages in Washington

The utilities that reported here serve 3,420,562 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 2.6 hr without power in an ordinary year and 11 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 76% of the outage time Washington recorded once they are counted: 11 hr against 2.6 hr without them, a factor of 4.1×. 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 21 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 year2.6 hr14 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 21 filings

With major events11 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 21 filings

Interruptions a year1.1×Ordinary year; 1.8× with major events

The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Washington’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 21 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 21 filings, out of 21 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
Puget Sound Energy Inc	1,240,043	3.4 hr	20 hr	1.2×
City of Seattle - (WA)	537,470	111 min	5.4 hr	0.8×
PUD No 1 of Snohomish County	386,741	3.0 hr	10 hr	1.6×
Avista Corp	270,134	112 min	2.5 hr	0.8×
PUD No 1 of Clark County - (WA)	233,669	59 min	2.4 hr	1.1×
City of Tacoma - (WA)	179,969	80 min	2.8 hr	0.6×
PacifiCorp	138,254	102 min	3.5 hr	0.7×
PUD No 1 of Benton County	56,863	40 min	53 min	0.4×
PUD No 1 of Cowlitz County	54,257	2.1 hr	4.4 hr	1.0×
PUD No 1 of Chelan County	51,143	95 min	2.9 hr	0.7×
Inland Power & Light Company	48,046	4.6 hr	6.4 hr	1.1×
PUD No 1 of Grays Harbor County	45,710	3.4 hr	7.8 hr	1.0×
PUD No 1 of Lewis County	35,583	10 hr	12 hr	3.3×
Peninsula Light Company	35,518	2.3 hr	11 hr	1.4×
City of Richland - (WA)	27,563	94 min	94 min	0.7×
PUD No 1 of Jefferson County	21,166	7.1 hr	8.7 hr	2.7×
Benton Rural Electric Assn	16,453	2.6 hr	31 hr	1.1×
Orcas Power & Light Coop	15,251	3.5 hr	4.2 hr	1.9×
City of Centralia - (WA)	10,745	56 min	3.0 hr	0.3×
Big Bend Electric Coop, Inc	9,477	3.2 hr	4.1 hr	0.8×
Columbia Rural Elec Assn, Inc	6,507	3.6 hr	4.3 hr	2.0×

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.