County annual report · FIPS 34013
2020 Essex County, NJ Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Essex County, NJ went without power for an average of 10.9 hours, a total of 4.2M customer-hours (New Jersey average 17.5 hours). That ranks 15th worst of 21 New Jersey counties and 733rd of 3,019 nationally.
Compared with NJ, the US and 2019
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of New Jersey 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 | July 30, 2020 19:45 | August 23, 2020 09:00 | 23d 13h | 85,509 | 3.7M |
| 2 | April 1, 2020 18:45 | April 3, 2020 08:15 | 1d 13h | 25,031 | 6,991 |
| 3 | December 22, 2020 13:45 | December 31, 2020 00:15 | 8d 10h | 10,044 | 29K |
| 4 | October 3, 2020 12:15 | October 4, 2020 09:00 | 20h 45m | 7,633 | 3,339 |
| 5 | December 8, 2020 12:45 | December 11, 2020 03:00 | 2d 14h | 6,571 | 2,750 |
| 6 | July 1, 2020 13:00 | July 9, 2020 05:15 | 7d 16h | 6,031 | 20K |
| 7 | July 18, 2020 17:45 | July 24, 2020 02:45 | 5d 9h | 5,498 | 40K |
| 8 | September 10, 2020 07:45 | September 13, 2020 01:30 | 2d 17h | 5,405 | 3,937 |
| 9 | November 11, 2020 16:30 | November 23, 2020 07:45 | 11d 15h | 5,108 | 41K |
| 10 | August 23, 2020 10:15 | August 24, 2020 05:45 | 19h 30m | 3,861 | 9,546 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 82 reached 100+ customers, 43 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 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public Service Elec & Gas Co | 2020 | 7.5 hrs | 1.07 | 45 min | 0.62 |
| Jersey Central Power & Lt Co | 2020 | 36.6 hrs | 2.74 | 3.1 hrs | 1.69 |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about 99% of New Jersey's customers in 2020; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 386,888 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, NJ 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/new-jersey/essex-county