County annual report · FIPS 25009
2021 Essex County, MA Power Outage Report
In 2021, customers in Essex County, MA went without power for an average of 5.9 hours, a total of 1.3M customer-hours (Massachusetts average 7.4 hours). That ranks 7th worst of 14 Massachusetts counties and 1168th of 2,974 nationally.
Compared with MA, the US and 2020
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of Massachusetts customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Essex County, 2021
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 26, 2021 15:45 | October 28, 2021 15:30 | 1d 23h | 43,048 | 595K |
| 2 | December 17, 2021 12:30 | December 18, 2021 01:15 | 12h 45m | 11,808 | 4,671 |
| 3 | February 1, 2021 21:00 | February 3, 2021 05:15 | 1d 8h | 11,419 | 36K |
| 4 | September 13, 2021 10:00 | September 14, 2021 06:30 | 20h 30m | 10,082 | 12K |
| 5 | March 1, 2021 18:00 | March 4, 2021 04:30 | 2d 10h | 9,591 | 92K |
| 6 | October 28, 2021 20:30 | October 31, 2021 03:15 | 2d 6h | 8,394 | 52K |
| 7 | January 10, 2021 12:30 | January 10, 2021 16:15 | 3h 45m | 7,539 | 3,955 |
| 8 | March 14, 2021 02:15 | March 14, 2021 13:30 | 11h 15m | 7,123 | 18K |
| 9 | January 29, 2021 03:00 | January 29, 2021 04:45 | 1h 45m | 6,527 | 8,836 |
| 10 | July 6, 2021 20:00 | July 9, 2021 03:15 | 2d 7h | 5,945 | 30K |
Outage episodes by size in 2021: 191 reached 100+ customers, 68 reached 1,000+ customers, 4 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 Essex County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2021, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts Electric Co | 2021 | 7.9 hrs | 1.26 | 1.6 hrs | 0.94 |
| Town of Reading - (MA) | 2021 | 22 min | 0.28 | 14 min | 0.25 |
| City of Marblehead - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| City of Peabody - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Danvers | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Georgetown - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Groveland - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Ipswich - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Merrimac - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Middleton - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Rowley - (MA) | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about 99% of Massachusetts's customers in 2021; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 216,314 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. Essex County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Essex County, MA annual power outage report, 2021, 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/2021/massachusetts/essex-county