County annual report · FIPS 06085
2020 Santa Clara County, CA Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Santa Clara County, CA went without power for an average of 3.8 hours, a total of 3.2M customer-hours (California average 6.3 hours). That ranks 45th worst of 57 California counties and 1670th of 3,019 nationally.
Compared with CA, the US and 2019
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of California customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Santa Clara County, 2020
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | August 13, 2020 14:45 | September 20, 2020 05:15 | 37d 14h | 34,460 | 1.5M |
| 2 | February 9, 2020 14:00 | February 16, 2020 08:30 | 6d 18h | 29,607 | 204K |
| 3 | October 26, 2020 04:45 | October 29, 2020 09:30 | 3d 4h | 9,802 | 164K |
| 4 | December 20, 2020 07:00 | December 21, 2020 11:45 | 1d 4h | 7,346 | 8,407 |
| 5 | May 25, 2020 20:15 | May 29, 2020 08:15 | 3d 12h | 7,225 | 79K |
| 6 | October 13, 2020 15:45 | October 16, 2020 11:30 | 2d 19h | 6,435 | 73K |
| 7 | January 10, 2020 13:30 | January 11, 2020 11:30 | 22h | 6,025 | 13K |
| 8 | February 21, 2020 15:15 | February 24, 2020 08:00 | 2d 16h | 5,990 | 21K |
| 9 | June 17, 2020 14:45 | June 21, 2020 04:30 | 3d 13h | 5,904 | 19K |
| 10 | May 17, 2020 15:00 | May 19, 2020 05:00 | 1d 14h | 5,902 | 7,893 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 246 reached 100+ customers, 72 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 Santa Clara County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2020, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pacific Gas & Electric Co. | 2020 | 7.4 hrs | 1.34 | 2.3 hrs | 1.04 |
| City of Palo Alto - (CA) | 2020 | 36 min | 0.49 | - | - |
| City of Santa Clara - (CA) | 2013 | 51 min | 0.52 | - | - |
| WAPA-- Western Area Power Administration | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about 94% of California's customers in 2020; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 844,715 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. Santa Clara County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Santa Clara County, CA annual power outage report, 2020, 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/2020/california/santa-clara-county