County annual report · FIPS 37021
2018 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2018, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 40.1 hours, a total of 1.3M customer-hours (North Carolina average 55.2 hours). That ranks 45th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 144th of 2,798 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2017
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe County, 2018
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, 2018 11:45 | July 7, 2018 09:15 | 21h 30m | 26,554 | 43K |
| 2 | December 9, 2018 00:15 | December 14, 2018 00:45 | 5d | 24,498 | 553K |
| 3 | August 8, 2018 11:00 | August 10, 2018 12:00 | 2d 1h | 19,997 | 45K |
| 4 | September 15, 2018 04:00 | September 18, 2018 05:00 | 3d 1h | 16,321 | 55K |
| 5 | April 11, 2018 10:15 | April 12, 2018 09:15 | 23h | 8,939 | 11K |
| 6 | April 23, 2018 09:15 | April 25, 2018 07:15 | 1d 22h | 8,649 | 32K |
| 7 | June 25, 2018 12:00 | June 28, 2018 05:30 | 2d 17h | 6,976 | 34K |
| 8 | June 17, 2018 16:45 | June 20, 2018 09:15 | 2d 16h | 6,837 | 20K |
| 9 | October 20, 2018 18:30 | October 23, 2018 05:45 | 2d 11h | 6,820 | 60K |
| 10 | November 21, 2018 14:15 | November 21, 2018 23:15 | 9h | 6,258 | 1,662 |
Outage episodes by size in 2018: 166 reached 100+ customers, 44 reached 1,000+ customers, 4 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 2018, 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) | 2018 | 43.0 hrs | 2.71 | 2.6 hrs | 1.33 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2018 | 13.1 hrs | 1.81 | 3.7 hrs | 1.19 |
| Haywood Electric Member Corp | 2018 | 33.4 hrs | 5.14 | 8.2 hrs | 3.40 |
| 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 82% of North Carolina's customers in 2018; 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, 2018, 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/2018/north-carolina/buncombe-county