County annual report · FIPS 37111
2024 McDowell County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2024, customers in McDowell County, NC went without power for an average of 372.6 hours, a total of 4.6M customer-hours (North Carolina average 66.1 hours). That ranks 9th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 19th of 2,990 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2023
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in McDowell 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 25, 2024 06:00 | October 31, 2024 01:45 | 35d 19h | 43,021 | 4.6M |
| 2 | March 20, 2024 00:00 | March 20, 2024 00:15 | 15m | 1,976 | 494 |
| 3 | May 4, 2024 16:45 | May 4, 2024 18:45 | 2h | 1,973 | 988 |
| 4 | January 2, 2024 09:45 | January 2, 2024 15:15 | 5h 30m | 1,505 | 1,986 |
| 5 | July 8, 2024 05:15 | July 8, 2024 06:30 | 1h 15m | 1,408 | 1,516 |
| 6 | August 8, 2024 14:45 | August 9, 2024 05:00 | 14h 15m | 1,225 | 4,836 |
| 7 | July 25, 2024 04:45 | July 25, 2024 21:15 | 16h 30m | 1,087 | 3,720 |
| 8 | July 30, 2024 11:15 | July 30, 2024 13:15 | 2h | 946 | 958 |
| 9 | August 2, 2024 17:15 | August 3, 2024 02:00 | 8h 45m | 930 | 3,681 |
| 10 | February 28, 2024 22:00 | February 29, 2024 20:00 | 22h | 802 | 2,657 |
Outage episodes by size in 2024: 59 reached 100+ customers, 7 reached 1,000+ customers, 1 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 McDowell 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duke Energy Progress - (NC) | 2024 | 17.2 hrs | 1.70 | 2.2 hrs | 1.22 |
| Duke Energy Carolinas, LLC | 2024 | 78.6 hrs | 2.50 | 2.9 hrs | 1.26 |
| Rutherford Elec Member Corp | 2024 | 92.2 hrs | 2.48 | 5.8 hrs | 1.11 |
| Duke Energy | - | - | - | - | - |
| French Broad 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 2024; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 12,442 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. McDowell County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), McDowell County, NC 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/north-carolina/mcdowell-county