County annual report · FIPS 37149
2020 Polk County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Polk County, NC went without power for an average of 100.5 hours, a total of 524K customer-hours (North Carolina average 20.3 hours). That ranks 10th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 65th 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 Polk 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 11:00 | November 3, 2020 22:00 | 5d 11h | 10,904 | 451K |
| 2 | August 29, 2020 03:30 | August 29, 2020 05:15 | 1h 45m | 2,578 | 3,898 |
| 3 | April 12, 2020 17:30 | April 14, 2020 23:00 | 2d 5h | 1,817 | 17K |
| 4 | July 16, 2020 06:00 | July 16, 2020 07:00 | 1h | 1,203 | 1,203 |
| 5 | July 6, 2020 20:30 | July 6, 2020 22:00 | 1h 30m | 1,097 | 1,434 |
| 6 | July 24, 2020 19:00 | July 24, 2020 21:30 | 2h 30m | 600 | 1,077 |
| 7 | December 25, 2020 01:30 | December 25, 2020 06:30 | 5h | 590 | 1,114 |
| 8 | December 7, 2020 19:15 | December 8, 2020 06:30 | 11h 15m | 567 | 1,879 |
| 9 | November 17, 2020 19:15 | November 17, 2020 23:15 | 4h | 544 | 946 |
| 10 | August 5, 2020 22:30 | August 6, 2020 05:00 | 6h 30m | 465 | 584 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 46 reached 100+ customers, 5 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 Polk 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 | - | - | - | - | - |
| Broad River Electric Coop, Inc | - | - | - | - | - |
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 ÷ 5,215 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. Polk County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Polk 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/polk-county