County annual report · FIPS 37183
2020 Wake County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Wake County, NC went without power for an average of 34.2 hours, a total of 1.6M customer-hours (North Carolina average 20.3 hours). That ranks 25th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 235th 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 Wake 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 | February 6, 2020 09:15 | February 9, 2020 05:45 | 2d 20h | 43,378 | 541K |
| 2 | April 12, 2020 23:30 | April 16, 2020 06:45 | 3d 7h | 39,032 | 230K |
| 3 | October 29, 2020 12:15 | October 31, 2020 04:45 | 1d 16h | 13,924 | 41K |
| 4 | July 12, 2020 18:15 | July 13, 2020 03:15 | 9h | 10,690 | 14K |
| 5 | August 3, 2020 10:15 | August 5, 2020 07:30 | 1d 21h | 10,582 | 72K |
| 6 | April 27, 2020 11:45 | April 28, 2020 00:15 | 12h 30m | 8,139 | 17K |
| 7 | June 17, 2020 00:30 | June 17, 2020 21:45 | 21h 15m | 7,714 | 20K |
| 8 | February 20, 2020 15:15 | February 22, 2020 01:15 | 1d 10h | 7,338 | 57K |
| 9 | January 15, 2020 09:00 | January 16, 2020 04:45 | 19h 45m | 6,694 | 6,430 |
| 10 | November 11, 2020 14:15 | November 12, 2020 07:45 | 17h 30m | 5,647 | 4,990 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 288 reached 100+ customers, 101 reached 1,000+ customers, 5 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 Wake 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 |
| Wake Electric Membership Corp | 2020 | 2.6 hrs | 1.52 | 64 min | 0.92 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| North Carolina Eastern M P A | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Apex- (NC) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Wake Forest - (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 ÷ 46,622 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. Wake County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Wake 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/wake-county