County annual report · FIPS 37149
2023 Polk County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2023, customers in Polk County, NC went without power for an average of 23.0 hours, a total of 120K customer-hours (North Carolina average 12.6 hours). That ranks 25th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 331st 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 Polk 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 | August 14, 2023 15:45 | August 15, 2023 10:45 | 19h | 3,098 | 4,698 |
| 2 | December 10, 2023 23:15 | December 12, 2023 03:00 | 1d 3h | 2,968 | 30K |
| 3 | August 12, 2023 22:00 | August 13, 2023 21:15 | 23h 15m | 1,723 | 16K |
| 4 | March 7, 2023 00:45 | March 7, 2023 06:30 | 5h 45m | 1,669 | 1,624 |
| 5 | December 7, 2023 00:30 | December 7, 2023 12:30 | 12h | 1,522 | 5,789 |
| 6 | June 10, 2023 23:15 | June 11, 2023 08:15 | 9h | 1,386 | 1,650 |
| 7 | August 2, 2023 06:30 | August 2, 2023 12:00 | 5h 30m | 1,221 | 2,988 |
| 8 | July 29, 2023 22:15 | July 31, 2023 01:45 | 1d 3h | 1,035 | 4,746 |
| 9 | February 18, 2023 01:45 | February 18, 2023 22:30 | 20h 45m | 970 | 1,860 |
| 10 | August 18, 2023 10:15 | August 18, 2023 17:45 | 7h 30m | 912 | 4,136 |
Outage episodes by size in 2023: 45 reached 100+ customers, 8 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 Polk 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 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| Broad River Electric Coop, Inc | - | - | - | - | - |
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 ÷ 5,215 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. Polk County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Polk 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/polk-county