County annual report · FIPS 30089
2024 Sanders County, MT Power Outage Report
In 2024, customers in Sanders County, MT went without power for an average of 4.5 hours, a total of 33K customer-hours (Montana average 8.5 hours). That ranks 29th worst of 51 Montana counties and 1713th of 2,990 nationally.
Compared with MT, the US and 2023
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of Montana customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Sanders County, 2024
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 26, 2024 01:30 | September 27, 2024 01:30 | 1d | 1,823 | 5,419 |
| 2 | July 30, 2024 11:15 | July 30, 2024 17:15 | 6h | 1,599 | 4,240 |
| 3 | January 11, 2024 18:15 | January 12, 2024 02:15 | 8h | 1,327 | 4,089 |
| 4 | January 13, 2024 18:00 | January 14, 2024 06:30 | 12h 30m | 863 | 2,112 |
| 5 | January 15, 2024 00:30 | January 15, 2024 02:45 | 2h 15m | 858 | 1,070 |
| 6 | October 4, 2024 22:15 | October 6, 2024 00:00 | 1d 1h | 761 | 1,851 |
| 7 | June 4, 2024 00:00 | June 4, 2024 02:30 | 2h 30m | 756 | 253 |
| 8 | July 15, 2024 22:00 | July 15, 2024 23:45 | 1h 45m | 438 | 767 |
| 9 | August 19, 2024 17:45 | August 19, 2024 23:30 | 5h 45m | 438 | 129 |
| 10 | May 16, 2024 22:30 | May 16, 2024 23:45 | 1h 15m | 437 | 546 |
Outage episodes by size in 2024: 25 reached 100+ customers, 3 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 Sanders County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2024, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NorthWestern Energy LLC - (MT) | 2024 | 3.9 hrs | 1.30 | 2.0 hrs | 0.95 |
| Avista Corp | 2024 | 3.1 hrs | 1.11 | 2.3 hrs | 0.94 |
| Flathead Electric Coop Inc | 2024 | 9.8 hrs | 2.72 | 3.9 hrs | 1.90 |
| NorthWestern Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| Northern Lights, Inc | - | - | - | - | - |
| USBIA-Mission Valley Power | - | - | - | - | - |
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 Montana's customers in 2024; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 7,314 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. Sanders County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Sanders County, MT annual power outage report, 2024, 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/2024/montana/sanders-county