County annual report · FIPS 37021
2023 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2023, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 23.0 hours, a total of 747K customer-hours (North Carolina average 12.6 hours). That ranks 26th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 332nd of 2,977 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2022
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe County, 2023
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | April 1, 2023 07:00 | April 4, 2023 03:00 | 2d 20h | 27,327 | 170K |
| 2 | March 3, 2023 16:45 | March 5, 2023 12:00 | 1d 19h | 9,919 | 51K |
| 3 | April 7, 2023 11:45 | April 8, 2023 06:15 | 18h 30m | 8,911 | 20K |
| 4 | July 29, 2023 17:15 | August 1, 2023 11:45 | 2d 18h | 8,045 | 54K |
| 5 | December 14, 2023 13:15 | December 15, 2023 03:45 | 14h 30m | 6,089 | 8,107 |
| 6 | June 29, 2023 12:30 | June 30, 2023 04:15 | 15h 45m | 4,381 | 2,399 |
| 7 | August 30, 2023 06:15 | September 1, 2023 01:00 | 1d 18h | 3,474 | 4,146 |
| 8 | July 1, 2023 18:45 | July 3, 2023 09:45 | 1d 15h | 3,401 | 32K |
| 9 | December 15, 2023 11:15 | December 16, 2023 00:45 | 13h 30m | 3,388 | 4,478 |
| 10 | June 14, 2023 12:15 | June 15, 2023 01:30 | 13h 15m | 3,003 | 1,686 |
Outage episodes by size in 2023: 196 reached 100+ customers, 57 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 Buncombe County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2023, 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) | 2023 | 3.7 hrs | 1.47 | 2.4 hrs | 1.22 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2023 | 5.0 hrs | 1.68 | 3.3 hrs | 1.52 |
| Haywood Electric Member Corp | 2023 | 10.6 hrs | 3.75 | 8.1 hrs | 3.15 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| French Broad Elec Member Corp | - | - | - | - | - |
About this data
- Outage figures come from DOE/ORNL EAGLE-I, which records customers out by county every 15 minutes. EAGLE-I tracked about n/a of North Carolina's customers in 2023; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 32,499 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. Buncombe County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Buncombe County, NC annual power outage report, 2023, 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/2023/north-carolina/buncombe-county