Grid reliability · 2024 · 25 reporting utilities

Power outages in Wisconsin

The utilities that reported here serve 2,388,513 customers between them, not the whole state. Weighted by customer count, they averaged 98 min without power in an ordinary year and 4.9 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 67% of the outage time Wisconsin recorded once they are counted: 4.9 hr against 98 min without them, a factor of 3.0×. 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 25 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 year98 min35 of 51 jurisdictions, longest first · 25 filings

With major events4.9 hrStorms, ice, and fires included as filed · 25 filings

Interruptions a year0.7×Ordinary year; 1.0× with major events

The bill sideWhat solar offsetsRates and modelled output by utility

The utilities behind the average

Each of Wisconsin’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 25 filings and the storm-inclusive average from 25 filings, out of 25 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
Wisconsin Electric Power Co	1,212,936	109 min	4.9 hr	0.7×
Wisconsin Public Service Corp	469,161	95 min	7.8 hr	0.8×
Northern States Power Co	260,234	2.0 hr	3.5 hr	0.9×
Madison Gas & Electric Co	166,686	42 min	4.6 hr	0.3×
Adams-Columbia Electric Coop	39,641	2.3 hr	2.3 hr	1.1×
Polk-Burnett Electric Coop	22,144	50 min	95 min	0.7×
Riverland Energy Cooperative	20,060	2.4 hr	4.4 hr	1.4×
Barron Electric Coop	19,756	2.4 hr	4.6 hr	1.5×
Sun Prairie Utilities	18,497	34 min	34 min	1.0×
Manitowoc Public Utilities	18,306	8 min	29 min	0.2×
Oakdale Electric Coop	18,055	67 min	2.5 hr	0.7×
City of Kaukauna	16,534	7 min	3.8 hr	0.1×
Superior Water and Light Co	14,817	7 min	22 min	0.1×
City of Marshfield - (WI)	13,908	20 min	36 min	0.4×
Dunn County Electric Coop	10,601	84 min	110 min	0.7×
City of Sturgeon Bay - (WI)	9,589	3 min	28 min	0.1×
City of Stoughton - (WI)	9,317	37 min	56 min	0.4×
City of Plymouth - (WI)	8,768	31 min	31 min	0.3×
Rock Energy Cooperative	7,640	38 min	88 min	0.4×
Village of Waunakee - (WI)	7,564	40 min	40 min	0.3×
City of River Falls	6,612	13 min	13 min	0.1×
Two Rivers Water & Light	6,198	0 min	89 min	0.0×
City of New Richmond	5,479	32 min	51 min	0.9×
Waupun Utilities	4,510	13 min	13 min	0.1×
Florence Utility Comm	1,500	42 min	42 min	0.3×

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.