County annual report · FIPS 25009
2020 Essex County, MA Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Essex County, MA went without power for an average of 2.9 hours, a total of 635K customer-hours (Massachusetts average 5.3 hours). That ranks 12th worst of 14 Massachusetts counties and 1894th of 3,019 nationally.
Compared with MA, the US and 2019
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of Massachusetts customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Essex 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 | September 30, 2020 07:45 | October 1, 2020 10:45 | 1d 3h | 13,560 | 44K |
| 2 | May 12, 2020 18:45 | May 12, 2020 21:45 | 3h | 9,524 | 5,282 |
| 3 | August 4, 2020 13:30 | August 7, 2020 01:15 | 2d 11h | 8,858 | 67K |
| 4 | August 23, 2020 19:15 | August 25, 2020 17:15 | 1d 22h | 8,853 | 53K |
| 5 | August 8, 2020 01:30 | August 9, 2020 03:00 | 1d 1h | 8,598 | 11K |
| 6 | June 18, 2020 10:45 | June 19, 2020 09:30 | 22h 45m | 8,204 | 9,110 |
| 7 | November 16, 2020 01:15 | November 17, 2020 04:00 | 1d 2h | 7,513 | 37K |
| 8 | August 25, 2020 18:00 | August 26, 2020 20:15 | 1d 2h | 4,997 | 5,442 |
| 9 | October 7, 2020 18:00 | October 9, 2020 02:00 | 1d 8h | 4,967 | 25K |
| 10 | November 24, 2020 03:45 | December 1, 2020 23:30 | 7d 19h | 4,920 | 32K |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 194 reached 100+ customers, 57 reached 1,000+ customers, 1 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 Essex 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts Electric Co | 2014 | 2.4 hrs | 1.12 | 1.6 hrs | 0.96 |
| Town of Reading - (MA) | 2020 | 38 min | 0.35 | 19 min | 0.23 |
| City of Marblehead - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| City of Peabody - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Danvers | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Georgetown - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Groveland - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Ipswich - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Merrimac - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Middleton - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Rowley - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
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 Massachusetts's customers in 2020; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 216,314 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. Essex County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Essex County, MA 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/massachusetts/essex-county