County annual report · FIPS 37021
2015 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2015, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 11.8 hours, a total of 383K customer-hours (North Carolina average 7.5 hours). That ranks 25th worst of 93 North Carolina counties and 225th of 2,484 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe County, 2015
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | December 24, 2015 01:45 | December 25, 2015 02:15 | 1d | 15,809 | 25K |
| 2 | October 13, 2015 06:15 | October 14, 2015 07:45 | 1d 1h | 8,436 | 10K |
| 3 | February 14, 2015 22:00 | February 16, 2015 04:15 | 1d 6h | 5,429 | 44K |
| 4 | November 23, 2015 11:45 | November 23, 2015 17:30 | 5h 45m | 5,393 | 4,242 |
| 5 | July 14, 2015 12:00 | July 15, 2015 11:00 | 23h | 4,723 | 19K |
| 6 | July 25, 2015 04:30 | July 25, 2015 17:15 | 12h 45m | 4,480 | 8,597 |
| 7 | November 10, 2015 14:15 | November 10, 2015 22:15 | 8h | 3,674 | 9,782 |
| 8 | June 21, 2015 22:15 | June 23, 2015 03:00 | 1d 4h | 3,228 | 5,806 |
| 9 | December 28, 2015 12:15 | December 29, 2015 19:45 | 1d 7h | 3,073 | 4,140 |
| 10 | October 27, 2015 03:15 | October 28, 2015 20:30 | 1d 17h | 3,012 | 5,772 |
Outage episodes by size in 2015: 164 reached 100+ customers, 46 reached 1,000+ customers, 1 reached 10,000+ customers.
Utility reliability filed with the EIA
SAIDI (average outage time per customer) and SAIFI (average interruptions per customer) that utilities serving Buncombe County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2015, or their most recent earlier filing. Utility-wide figures, not county-specific.
| Utility | EIA year | SAIDI | SAIFI | SAIDI excl. major events | SAIFI excl. major events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duke Energy Progress - (NC) | 2015 | 4.8 hrs | 1.90 | 3.0 hrs | 1.65 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2015 | 5.3 hrs | 1.29 | 2.6 hrs | 1.02 |
| Haywood Electric Member Corp | 2015 | 9.1 hrs | 3.63 | 6.5 hrs | 3.19 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| French Broad Elec Member Corp | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about n/a of North Carolina's customers in 2015; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 32,499 customers (ORNL modeled county customer count), including major storm days. It is comparable across counties but is not the SAIDI a utility files.
- An outage event is a continuous stretch with customers out; counts at 100, 1,000 and 10,000+ use its peak.
- Years loaded: 2015–2025. Buncombe County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Buncombe County, NC annual power outage report, 2015, data as of Oct 3, 2026 02:41 UTC, sources: DOE EAGLE-I (https://eagle-i.doe.gov/); EAGLE-I modeled customer counts (MCC) (https://figshare.com/); EIA Form 861 (utility reliability) (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/). https://massoutage.com/reports/2015/north-carolina/buncombe-county