County annual report · FIPS 25027
2020 Worcester County, MA Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Worcester County, MA went without power for an average of 17.8 hours, a total of 3.8M customer-hours (Massachusetts average 5.3 hours). That ranks 2nd worst of 14 Massachusetts counties and 474th 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 Worcester 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 4, 2020 17:15 | August 9, 2020 07:00 | 4d 13h | 70,225 | 1.6M |
| 2 | October 7, 2020 18:45 | October 12, 2020 00:45 | 4d 6h | 44,540 | 913K |
| 3 | May 9, 2020 07:45 | May 10, 2020 08:45 | 1d 1h | 22,926 | 41K |
| 4 | April 13, 2020 10:00 | April 16, 2020 08:30 | 2d 22h | 22,274 | 160K |
| 5 | December 5, 2020 11:15 | December 8, 2020 04:15 | 2d 17h | 19,064 | 227K |
| 6 | June 6, 2020 18:30 | June 8, 2020 13:15 | 1d 18h | 13,481 | 68K |
| 7 | November 30, 2020 14:00 | December 2, 2020 01:15 | 1d 11h | 11,914 | 69K |
| 8 | May 15, 2020 23:30 | May 17, 2020 08:15 | 1d 8h | 10,918 | 82K |
| 9 | August 23, 2020 08:00 | August 26, 2020 02:45 | 2d 18h | 6,812 | 66K |
| 10 | September 30, 2020 03:30 | October 1, 2020 09:45 | 1d 6h | 6,454 | 31K |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 293 reached 100+ customers, 87 reached 1,000+ customers, 8 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 Worcester 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 |
| Unitil Energy Systems | 2020 | 2.9 hrs | 1.86 | 2.0 hrs | 1.60 |
| Fitchburg Gas & Elec Light Co | 2020 | 4.3 hrs | 2.84 | 65 min | 1.27 |
| Town of Sterling - (MA) | 2013 | 19 min | 0.28 | 8 min | 0.13 |
| Town of Ashburnham - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Boylston - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Holden - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Paxton - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Princeton - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Shrewsbury - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Templeton - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of West Boylston - (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 ÷ 212,617 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. Worcester County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Worcester 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/worcester-county