EIA Annual Electric Power Industry Report Update

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) collects data on outage frequency and duration from electric utilities, for every outage that lasts more than five minutes, and releases a report of the data each year.  I recently received the 2016 Annual Electric Power Industry Report, which contained some interesting information that is relevant to emergency preparedness.

Insights from the EIA Annual Electric Power Report

Click on the EIA ’s link above if you want to digest the full report.  If you want more of a Cliff Notes version, here are some tidbits from the 2016 data that I found interesting:

• Across the entire U.S., electric customers experienced an average of 1.3 outages and were without power for an average of 4 hours in 2016.
• Municipal utility customers experienced the lowest frequency and duration of power outages in 2016, followed by investor-owned utilities and coops, respectively.
• The 2 states that scored poorly on both frequency and duration were Maine and West Virginia.
• The top-4 states in terms of lowest outage frequency and duration were Nevada, New York, Arizona and Nebraska.
• Hurricane Matthew caused South Carolina’s average outage duration to be highest in the U.S. in 2016 (average = 20 hours).

The usefulness of the EIA data emanates from the fact that it provides perspective, not precision.  The exact numbers are really not what’s important; what is important is how each state’s numbers compare to one another.  In other words, whether we divide 1 by 10 or 100,000 by 1,000,000, we still get 10%.  So for that reason, I think the EIA annual report is worth a quick read.

Yes, thanks to the EIA, it’s all relative, baby!