County annual report · FIPS 37189
2020 Watauga County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2020, customers in Watauga County, NC went without power for an average of 1.4 hours, a total of 26K customer-hours (North Carolina average 20.3 hours). That ranks 91st worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 2481st 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 Watauga 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 | December 24, 2020 14:30 | December 25, 2020 07:15 | 16h 45m | 1,762 | 2,371 |
| 2 | April 13, 2020 05:30 | April 14, 2020 04:15 | 22h 45m | 1,494 | 3,025 |
| 3 | June 29, 2020 14:15 | June 29, 2020 18:30 | 4h 15m | 1,325 | 531 |
| 4 | June 8, 2020 19:00 | June 8, 2020 22:15 | 3h 15m | 1,203 | 607 |
| 5 | July 10, 2020 21:45 | July 10, 2020 23:30 | 1h 45m | 1,090 | 1,094 |
| 6 | February 13, 2020 19:45 | February 13, 2020 20:30 | 45m | 981 | 496 |
| 7 | January 13, 2020 15:45 | January 13, 2020 19:30 | 3h 45m | 733 | 188 |
| 8 | May 23, 2020 23:15 | May 23, 2020 23:45 | 30m | 707 | 354 |
| 9 | January 12, 2020 02:00 | January 12, 2020 07:15 | 5h 15m | 489 | 1,052 |
| 10 | January 6, 2020 21:15 | January 6, 2020 23:00 | 1h 45m | 474 | 433 |
Outage episodes by size in 2020: 31 reached 100+ customers, 5 reached 1,000+ customers, 0 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 Watauga 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue Ridge Elec Member Corp - (NC) | 2020 | 75 min | 1.02 | 69 min | 0.97 |
| New River Light & Power Co | 2020 | 19 min | 0.41 | 19 min | 0.41 |
| Mountain 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 ÷ 18,248 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. Watauga County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Watauga 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/watauga-county