County annual report · FIPS 37189
2017 Watauga County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2017, customers in Watauga County, NC went without power for an average of 3.0 hours, a total of 55K customer-hours (North Carolina average 10.0 hours). That ranks 64th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 1337th 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 Watauga 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 19:30 | September 13, 2017 00:45 | 1d 5h | 2,426 | 14K |
| 2 | December 9, 2017 00:45 | December 9, 2017 22:45 | 22h | 2,008 | 3,601 |
| 3 | October 23, 2017 14:30 | October 24, 2017 22:45 | 1d 8h | 1,871 | 3,329 |
| 4 | April 7, 2017 05:00 | April 7, 2017 08:30 | 3h 30m | 1,656 | 1,443 |
| 5 | January 23, 2017 08:30 | January 23, 2017 11:45 | 3h 15m | 1,584 | 4,360 |
| 6 | January 24, 2017 03:30 | January 24, 2017 15:30 | 12h | 1,440 | 4,361 |
| 7 | May 1, 2017 05:30 | May 1, 2017 10:45 | 5h 15m | 1,440 | 1,197 |
| 8 | May 1, 2017 13:30 | May 1, 2017 23:00 | 9h 30m | 1,061 | 1,323 |
| 9 | April 6, 2017 11:15 | April 6, 2017 13:45 | 2h 30m | 944 | 1,322 |
| 10 | March 1, 2017 23:00 | March 2, 2017 06:45 | 7h 45m | 610 | 834 |
Outage episodes by size in 2017: 30 reached 100+ customers, 8 reached 1,000+ customers, 0 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 Watauga 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue Ridge Elec Member Corp - (NC) | 2017 | 3.6 hrs | 1.52 | 73 min | 0.99 |
| New River Light & Power Co | 2017 | 24 min | 0.30 | 24 min | 0.30 |
| Mountain Electric Coop, Inc | - | - | - | - | - |
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 ÷ 18,248 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. Watauga County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Watauga 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/watauga-county