County annual report · FIPS 37021
2020 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 18.1 hours, a total of 590K customer-hours (North Carolina average 20.3 hours). That ranks 40th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 471st of 3,019 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2019
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe 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 | April 12, 2020 20:30 | April 15, 2020 19:30 | 2d 23h | 11,649 | 87K |
| 2 | October 28, 2020 19:00 | November 1, 2020 04:00 | 3d 9h | 6,420 | 44K |
| 3 | June 27, 2020 03:45 | June 27, 2020 05:30 | 1h 45m | 6,351 | 11K |
| 4 | August 21, 2020 08:15 | August 21, 2020 22:00 | 13h 45m | 4,878 | 7,797 |
| 5 | October 1, 2020 19:00 | October 2, 2020 03:45 | 8h 45m | 4,002 | 3,058 |
| 6 | November 1, 2020 05:00 | November 3, 2020 03:15 | 1d 22h | 3,698 | 21K |
| 7 | November 10, 2020 20:30 | November 12, 2020 02:30 | 1d 6h | 3,144 | 5,409 |
| 8 | January 18, 2020 06:45 | January 18, 2020 23:00 | 16h 15m | 3,125 | 18K |
| 9 | April 17, 2020 21:30 | April 17, 2020 23:15 | 1h 45m | 3,124 | 2,937 |
| 10 | October 17, 2020 18:30 | October 17, 2020 20:00 | 1h 30m | 2,968 | 3,710 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 174 reached 100+ customers, 49 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 Buncombe 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duke Energy Progress - (NC) | 2020 | 5.2 hrs | 1.81 | 2.3 hrs | 1.37 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2020 | 11.2 hrs | 1.71 | 3.1 hrs | 1.18 |
| Haywood Electric Member Corp | 2020 | 19.4 hrs | 5.16 | 7.4 hrs | 3.70 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| French Broad Elec Member Corp | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about 91% of North Carolina's customers in 2020; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 32,499 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. Buncombe County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Buncombe County, NC 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/north-carolina/buncombe-county