County annual report · FIPS 37021
2019 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2019, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 19.6 hours, a total of 637K customer-hours (North Carolina average 12.9 hours). That ranks 30th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 222nd of 2,945 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2018
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe County, 2019
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | April 9, 2019 13:30 | April 9, 2019 22:45 | 9h 15m | 17,785 | 43K |
| 2 | May 19, 2019 07:15 | May 20, 2019 06:45 | 23h 30m | 11,033 | 3,360 |
| 3 | December 15, 2019 12:15 | December 20, 2019 00:45 | 4d 12h | 11,031 | 8,678 |
| 4 | January 12, 2019 22:15 | January 14, 2019 22:45 | 2d | 6,098 | 56K |
| 5 | October 29, 2019 07:45 | November 2, 2019 19:15 | 4d 11h | 5,554 | 42K |
| 6 | February 24, 2019 10:30 | February 26, 2019 03:45 | 1d 17h | 5,487 | 34K |
| 7 | April 23, 2019 02:45 | April 23, 2019 06:30 | 3h 45m | 4,974 | 2,319 |
| 8 | April 14, 2019 13:15 | April 16, 2019 05:30 | 1d 16h | 3,597 | 12K |
| 9 | August 20, 2019 07:15 | August 24, 2019 17:45 | 4d 10h | 3,482 | 12K |
| 10 | July 15, 2019 07:15 | July 18, 2019 06:00 | 2d 22h | 3,381 | 9,505 |
Outage episodes by size in 2019: 154 reached 100+ customers, 50 reached 1,000+ customers, 3 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 2019, 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 90% of North Carolina's customers in 2019; 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, 2019, 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/2019/north-carolina/buncombe-county