County annual report · FIPS 37039
2023 Cherokee County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2023, customers in Cherokee County, NC went without power for an average of 17.1 hours, a total of 276K customer-hours (North Carolina average 12.6 hours). That ranks 30th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 501st 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 Cherokee 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 | July 1, 2023 22:15 | July 3, 2023 16:00 | 1d 17h | 5,822 | 39K |
| 2 | March 3, 2023 18:30 | March 5, 2023 17:45 | 1d 23h | 3,506 | 30K |
| 3 | August 29, 2023 07:30 | August 30, 2023 06:30 | 23h | 3,342 | 13K |
| 4 | August 25, 2023 09:45 | August 25, 2023 14:45 | 5h | 2,866 | 5,579 |
| 5 | July 30, 2023 00:30 | July 30, 2023 17:30 | 17h | 2,852 | 8,339 |
| 6 | August 12, 2023 17:30 | August 13, 2023 23:45 | 1d 6h | 2,803 | 12K |
| 7 | August 7, 2023 19:15 | August 9, 2023 02:15 | 1d 7h | 2,650 | 13K |
| 8 | July 19, 2023 03:15 | July 20, 2023 05:30 | 1d 2h | 2,324 | 27K |
| 9 | June 25, 2023 18:15 | June 27, 2023 01:45 | 1d 7h | 2,313 | 9,603 |
| 10 | July 20, 2023 10:15 | July 21, 2023 01:00 | 14h 45m | 2,242 | 4,483 |
Outage episodes by size in 2023: 73 reached 100+ customers, 28 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 Cherokee 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 |
| Blue Ridge Mountain EMC - (GA) | 2023 | 10.7 hrs | 4.78 | 5.4 hrs | 3.19 |
| Tri-State Electric Member Corp | - | - | - | - | - |
| Town of Murphy - (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 ÷ 16,160 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. Cherokee County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Cherokee 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/cherokee-county