County annual report · FIPS 06091
2020 Sierra County, CA Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Sierra County, CA went without power for an average of 202.8 hours, a total of 420K customer-hours (California average 6.3 hours). That ranks 1st worst of 57 California counties and 18th 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 Sierra 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 | March 15, 2020 10:45 | March 24, 2020 23:15 | 9d 12h | 1,701 | 182K |
| 2 | September 8, 2020 05:15 | September 10, 2020 23:45 | 2d 18h | 1,681 | 79K |
| 3 | September 28, 2020 01:30 | September 28, 2020 23:30 | 22h | 1,679 | 19K |
| 4 | October 25, 2020 21:15 | October 30, 2020 01:30 | 4d 4h | 1,509 | 91K |
| 5 | July 8, 2020 22:00 | July 9, 2020 21:30 | 23h 30m | 995 | 3,362 |
| 6 | November 30, 2020 16:00 | November 30, 2020 18:30 | 2h 30m | 992 | 747 |
| 7 | November 17, 2020 18:45 | November 18, 2020 03:15 | 8h 30m | 726 | 5,970 |
| 8 | November 18, 2020 06:00 | November 18, 2020 09:15 | 3h 15m | 725 | 2,301 |
| 9 | July 1, 2020 04:15 | July 1, 2020 04:30 | 15m | 724 | 181 |
| 10 | December 7, 2020 16:30 | December 7, 2020 17:15 | 45m | 704 | 409 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 25 reached 100+ customers, 4 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 Sierra 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 |
| Liberty Utilities | 2020 | 4.0 hrs | 1.87 | 4.0 hrs | 1.87 |
| Plumas-Sierra Rural Elec Coop | - | - | - | - | - |
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 ÷ 2,072 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. Sierra County has data for 2017–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Sierra 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/sierra-county