County annual report · FIPS 35025
2021 Lea County, NM Power Outage Report
In 2021, customers in Lea County, NM went without power for an average of 3.6 hours, a total of 171K customer-hours (New Mexico average 2.6 hours). That ranks 10th worst of 27 New Mexico counties and 1641st of 2,974 nationally.
Compared with NM, the US and 2020
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of New Mexico customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Lea 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 | February 16, 2021 13:15 | February 17, 2021 07:45 | 18h 30m | 6,217 | 30K |
| 2 | February 14, 2021 14:00 | February 15, 2021 23:15 | 1d 9h | 2,793 | 35K |
| 3 | December 17, 2021 17:00 | December 17, 2021 22:15 | 5h 15m | 2,560 | 3,208 |
| 4 | August 21, 2021 21:45 | August 24, 2021 11:15 | 2d 13h | 2,177 | 20K |
| 5 | February 14, 2021 00:30 | February 14, 2021 13:15 | 12h 45m | 1,509 | 2,884 |
| 6 | January 12, 2021 13:15 | January 12, 2021 21:15 | 8h | 1,459 | 4,186 |
| 7 | August 13, 2021 00:45 | August 14, 2021 02:15 | 1d 1h | 1,434 | 7,532 |
| 8 | September 27, 2021 14:15 | September 28, 2021 01:15 | 11h | 1,373 | 1,949 |
| 9 | June 19, 2021 01:30 | June 19, 2021 02:15 | 45m | 1,245 | 313 |
| 10 | March 17, 2021 16:15 | March 17, 2021 23:15 | 7h | 1,166 | 1,821 |
Outage episodes by size in 2021: 73 reached 100+ customers, 13 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 Lea 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southwestern Public Service Co | 2021 | 3.2 hrs | 1.75 | 2.0 hrs | 1.07 |
| Central Valley Elec Coop, Inc | 2021 | 8.8 hrs | 2.91 | 5.7 hrs | 2.26 |
| Lea County Electric Coop, Inc - (NM) | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about 82% of New Mexico's customers in 2021; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 46,964 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. Lea County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Lea County, NM 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-mexico/lea-county