County annual report · FIPS 37021
2017 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2017, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 38.6 hours, a total of 1.3M customer-hours (North Carolina average 10.0 hours). That ranks 13th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 121st of 2,786 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2016
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe County, 2017
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | September 11, 2017 11:45 | September 16, 2017 03:30 | 4d 15h | 18,619 | 553K |
| 2 | December 8, 2017 17:00 | December 12, 2017 08:15 | 3d 15h | 15,493 | 280K |
| 3 | October 28, 2017 23:15 | October 31, 2017 02:45 | 2d 3h | 7,024 | 45K |
| 4 | March 27, 2017 11:15 | March 27, 2017 21:30 | 10h 15m | 6,452 | 5,004 |
| 5 | May 1, 2017 04:45 | May 3, 2017 07:00 | 2d 2h | 4,859 | 19K |
| 6 | September 29, 2017 10:45 | October 4, 2017 09:00 | 4d 22h | 3,541 | 3,950 |
| 7 | August 7, 2017 23:45 | August 9, 2017 03:30 | 1d 3h | 3,484 | 11K |
| 8 | August 31, 2017 16:15 | September 2, 2017 02:30 | 1d 10h | 3,397 | 11K |
| 9 | September 28, 2017 13:15 | September 29, 2017 00:45 | 11h 30m | 3,369 | 3,505 |
| 10 | February 9, 2017 05:15 | February 9, 2017 23:30 | 18h 15m | 3,184 | 6,699 |
Outage episodes by size in 2017: 147 reached 100+ customers, 45 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 2017, 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) | 2017 | 3.2 hrs | 1.52 | 2.7 hrs | 1.47 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2017 | 8.8 hrs | 1.52 | 3.1 hrs | 1.11 |
| Haywood Electric Member Corp | 2017 | 28.4 hrs | 5.16 | 7.7 hrs | 3.76 |
| 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 2017; 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, 2017, 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/2017/north-carolina/buncombe-county