County annual report · FIPS 34013
2021 Essex County, NJ Power Outage Report
In 2021, customers in Essex County, NJ went without power for an average of 2.6 hours, a total of 1.0M customer-hours (New Jersey average 2.9 hours). That ranks 9th worst of 21 New Jersey counties and 1985th of 2,974 nationally.
Compared with NJ, the US and 2020
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of New Jersey 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 | August 21, 2021 14:45 | September 12, 2021 04:45 | 21d 14h | 25,768 | 470K |
| 2 | November 18, 2021 20:00 | November 20, 2021 21:30 | 2d 1h | 6,755 | 10K |
| 3 | June 28, 2021 07:00 | July 12, 2021 03:15 | 13d 20h | 6,242 | 141K |
| 4 | September 21, 2021 13:30 | October 13, 2021 06:00 | 21d 16h | 5,648 | 31K |
| 5 | June 3, 2021 21:45 | June 11, 2021 21:30 | 7d 23h | 5,114 | 47K |
| 6 | December 29, 2021 16:45 | December 30, 2021 03:00 | 10h 15m | 4,594 | 3,490 |
| 7 | January 3, 2021 17:30 | January 4, 2021 05:30 | 12h | 4,393 | 2,335 |
| 8 | September 12, 2021 16:45 | September 18, 2021 05:00 | 5d 12h | 4,367 | 24K |
| 9 | December 21, 2021 11:30 | December 21, 2021 19:45 | 8h 15m | 4,143 | 1,752 |
| 10 | February 15, 2021 13:15 | February 17, 2021 05:00 | 1d 15h | 4,036 | 7,221 |
Outage episodes by size in 2021: 119 reached 100+ customers, 61 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 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Public Service Elec & Gas Co | 2021 | 60 min | 0.66 | 41 min | 0.60 |
| Jersey Central Power & Lt Co | 2021 | 5.8 hrs | 1.89 | 3.2 hrs | 1.59 |
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 New Jersey's customers in 2021; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 386,888 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, NJ 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/new-jersey/essex-county