County annual report · FIPS 37023
2023 Burke County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2023, customers in Burke County, NC went without power for an average of 13.8 hours, a total of 272K customer-hours (North Carolina average 12.6 hours). That ranks 34th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 630th 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 Burke 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 | November 10, 2023 07:45 | November 10, 2023 22:30 | 14h 45m | 7,646 | 35K |
| 2 | August 7, 2023 09:45 | August 9, 2023 23:30 | 2d 13h | 5,654 | 32K |
| 3 | August 25, 2023 22:00 | August 26, 2023 05:15 | 7h 15m | 4,761 | 3,098 |
| 4 | May 16, 2023 21:45 | May 17, 2023 23:45 | 1d 2h | 3,867 | 11K |
| 5 | April 1, 2023 18:15 | April 2, 2023 21:15 | 1d 3h | 3,205 | 33K |
| 6 | June 13, 2023 13:00 | June 13, 2023 21:15 | 8h 15m | 3,145 | 2,915 |
| 7 | May 30, 2023 11:30 | May 30, 2023 15:15 | 3h 45m | 2,766 | 1,967 |
| 8 | May 13, 2023 00:15 | May 13, 2023 03:45 | 3h 30m | 1,929 | 1,711 |
| 9 | January 14, 2023 06:45 | January 14, 2023 22:15 | 15h 30m | 1,863 | 9,225 |
| 10 | August 3, 2023 11:00 | August 3, 2023 22:15 | 11h 15m | 1,810 | 5,308 |
Outage episodes by size in 2023: 121 reached 100+ customers, 21 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 Burke 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 Carolinas, LLC | 2023 | 5.0 hrs | 1.68 | 3.3 hrs | 1.52 |
| Rutherford Elec Member Corp | 2023 | 2.4 hrs | 1.09 | 1.6 hrs | 0.88 |
| Mountain Electric Coop, Inc | 2023 | 4.3 hrs | 3.04 | 4.3 hrs | 3.04 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| City of Morganton - (NC) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Drexel - (NC) | - | - | - | - | - |
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 ÷ 19,746 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. Burke County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Burke 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/burke-county