County annual report · FIPS 37047
2023 Columbus County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2023, customers in Columbus County, NC went without power for an average of 2.9 hours, a total of 67K customer-hours (North Carolina average 12.6 hours). That ranks 78th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 1974th 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 Columbus 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 | September 18, 2023 21:15 | September 18, 2023 23:45 | 2h 30m | 4,944 | 1,393 |
| 2 | July 3, 2023 16:30 | July 4, 2023 01:30 | 9h | 2,797 | 8,363 |
| 3 | July 27, 2023 13:00 | July 27, 2023 18:00 | 5h | 2,633 | 2,649 |
| 4 | July 1, 2023 15:00 | July 1, 2023 17:00 | 2h | 2,598 | 1,317 |
| 5 | August 30, 2023 22:30 | September 1, 2023 01:30 | 1d 3h | 2,575 | 15K |
| 6 | August 27, 2023 21:15 | August 28, 2023 07:15 | 10h | 1,085 | 1,732 |
| 7 | July 17, 2023 01:45 | July 17, 2023 02:30 | 45m | 997 | 747 |
| 8 | August 15, 2023 22:00 | August 16, 2023 06:00 | 8h | 973 | 1,730 |
| 9 | January 4, 2023 13:00 | January 4, 2023 22:30 | 9h 30m | 904 | 962 |
| 10 | July 4, 2023 18:15 | July 5, 2023 05:15 | 11h | 848 | 986 |
Outage episodes by size in 2023: 48 reached 100+ customers, 6 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 Columbus 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 |
| Brunswick Electric Member Corp | 2023 | 57 min | 0.89 | 26 min | 0.46 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| Four County 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 ÷ 22,736 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. Columbus County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Columbus 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/columbus-county