County annual report · FIPS 37023
2020 Burke County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Burke County, NC went without power for an average of 21.0 hours, a total of 415K customer-hours (North Carolina average 20.3 hours). That ranks 36th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 408th 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 Burke 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 | October 29, 2020 10:15 | November 3, 2020 21:15 | 5d 11h | 10,129 | 334K |
| 2 | August 22, 2020 18:15 | August 22, 2020 18:45 | 30m | 2,936 | 1,468 |
| 3 | January 11, 2020 20:45 | January 13, 2020 01:30 | 1d 4h | 2,596 | 12K |
| 4 | May 19, 2020 16:00 | May 20, 2020 04:30 | 12h 30m | 2,033 | 741 |
| 5 | April 13, 2020 04:00 | April 14, 2020 17:30 | 1d 13h | 1,777 | 6,977 |
| 6 | July 10, 2020 22:00 | July 11, 2020 19:15 | 21h 15m | 1,571 | 12K |
| 7 | June 11, 2020 14:30 | June 11, 2020 15:15 | 45m | 1,522 | 1,142 |
| 8 | August 29, 2020 22:00 | August 30, 2020 01:00 | 3h | 1,474 | 1,834 |
| 9 | November 15, 2020 18:45 | November 15, 2020 20:30 | 1h 45m | 1,410 | 2,119 |
| 10 | July 29, 2020 09:15 | July 29, 2020 15:15 | 6h | 1,077 | 5,912 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 48 reached 100+ customers, 12 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 Burke 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 Carolinas, LLC | 2020 | 11.2 hrs | 1.71 | 3.1 hrs | 1.18 |
| Rutherford Elec Member Corp | 2020 | 5.2 hrs | 1.38 | 86 min | 0.94 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| Mountain Electric Coop, Inc | - | - | - | - | - |
| City of Morganton - (NC) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Drexel - (NC) | - | - | - | - | - |
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 ÷ 19,746 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. Burke County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Burke 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/burke-county