County annual report · FIPS 37021
2016 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2016, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 17.8 hours, a total of 577K customer-hours (North Carolina average 30.5 hours). That ranks 49th worst of 93 North Carolina counties and 169th of 2,391 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2015
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe County, 2016
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | July 6, 2016 17:00 | July 10, 2016 22:30 | 4d 5h | 14,367 | 100K |
| 2 | February 4, 2016 09:30 | February 5, 2016 03:15 | 17h 45m | 13,821 | 17K |
| 3 | March 22, 2016 11:00 | March 22, 2016 20:15 | 9h 15m | 8,565 | 6,969 |
| 4 | January 22, 2016 12:45 | January 24, 2016 22:30 | 2d 9h | 7,639 | 23K |
| 5 | November 3, 2016 06:30 | November 3, 2016 22:30 | 16h | 6,390 | 11K |
| 6 | April 2, 2016 19:00 | April 5, 2016 03:45 | 2d 8h | 5,371 | 71K |
| 7 | December 2, 2016 19:30 | December 3, 2016 04:15 | 8h 45m | 4,543 | 4,578 |
| 8 | February 24, 2016 09:00 | February 26, 2016 00:30 | 1d 15h | 4,510 | 20K |
| 9 | July 28, 2016 09:15 | July 29, 2016 05:30 | 20h 15m | 4,225 | 2,401 |
| 10 | July 5, 2016 12:15 | July 6, 2016 04:15 | 16h | 4,141 | 13K |
Outage episodes by size in 2016: 164 reached 100+ customers, 44 reached 1,000+ customers, 2 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 2016, 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) | 2016 | 63.5 hrs | 3.55 | 3.0 hrs | 1.63 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2016 | 5.2 hrs | 1.34 | 2.8 hrs | 1.08 |
| Haywood Electric Member Corp | 2016 | 6.6 hrs | 3.05 | 6.6 hrs | 3.05 |
| 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 2016; 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, 2016, 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/2016/north-carolina/buncombe-county