How our data works

Every 10 minutes we read the outage data each utility publishes for its public outage map, and the U.S. Department of Energy's ODIN outage feed for utilities that report there. We count customers, the way utilities do. A customer is one electric account, usually one home or business, not one person. Utilities count outages this way.

We check every utility's outage data every 10 minutes. Each utility updates its own map on its own schedule, usually every 5 to 15 minutes. If a utility's data can't be read on a run, its pages keep showing the last good numbers for up to an hour, marked as temporarily unavailable.

Utilities hide very small outages for privacy and publish them only as "fewer than 5". Where many of these add up, we show an estimate ("about …").

Utilities group outages by the city in each customer's mailing address. A city's count can include nearby areas outside its city limits, and only covers that utility's customers.

Some utilities publish only how many customers are out, not where. Their outages are in the counts but can't be drawn on the map.

We currently track 52 utilities: AEP Ohio, AEP Texas, Alabama Power, Ameren Illinois, Ameren Missouri, Appalachian Power, Austin Energy, CenterPoint Energy, Central Hudson, Consumers Energy, CPS Energy, Dominion Energy, Duquesne Light, Entergy Arkansas, Entergy Louisiana, Entergy Mississippi, Entergy New Orleans, Entergy Texas, Evergy, Georgia Power, Indiana Michigan Power, JCP&L, JEA, Kentucky Power, LG&E and KU, Met-Ed, MidAmerican Energy, Mississippi Power, Mon Power, National Grid, NYSEG and RG&E, OG&E, Ohio Edison, Oncor, PacifiCorp (Pacific Power / Rocky Mountain Power), Penelec, Penn Power, PG&E, PNM, Portland General Electric, Potomac Edison, PSE&G, PSEG Long Island, Public Service Company of Oklahoma, Puget Sound Energy, SDG&E, Seattle City Light, Southern California Edison, SWEPCO, The Illuminating Company, Toledo Edison, West Penn Power. Some large utilities, including FPL and Duke Energy, don't yet publish outage data in a form we can use; their customers should check their utility's own map.

From EAGLE-I, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's record of utility outage data every 15 minutes since 2014 (CC BY 4.0). It covered about 9 in 10 U.S. customers. We counted significant outages in that record for every county and state. At least 1% of the area's customers, and at least 100, without power at the same time. Outages less than 6 hours apart count as one.

Before counting, we removed readings that were clearly collection errors, such as a county briefly reported at exactly double its count, or a short spike to many times its usual level that dropped straight back. About 1,000 of the 25 to 30 million readings a year were removed this way. We checked the results against published figures for major storms, including Winter Storm Uri and Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, Ian, Milton and Irma.

Counties, cities and ZIP codes come from the U.S. Census Bureau (2025 gazetteer, 2020 ZIP code tabulation areas and relationship files). Which utilities serve each county comes from EIA Form 861. From EIA Form 861, the U.S. Energy Information Administration's yearly survey of every electric utility and the areas it serves.

Our collector identifies itself as findpoweroutage.com-bot/0.1 (+https://findpoweroutage.com/about/data; public outage data aggregator). It reads only public outage data, follows each site's robots.txt, and limits itself to a few requests at a time per site. Utilities with questions or requests about it can email [email protected].