County annual report · FIPS 37189
2024 Watauga County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2024, customers in Watauga County, NC went without power for an average of 178.5 hours, a total of 3.3M customer-hours (North Carolina average 66.1 hours). That ranks 16th worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 49th 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 Watauga 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 27, 2024 14:00 | October 13, 2024 22:45 | 16d 8h | 25,405 | 3.2M |
| 2 | September 27, 2024 00:45 | September 27, 2024 11:00 | 10h 15m | 2,176 | 3,858 |
| 3 | July 23, 2024 21:00 | July 24, 2024 01:30 | 4h 30m | 1,658 | 2,463 |
| 4 | July 18, 2024 15:30 | July 18, 2024 16:45 | 1h 15m | 1,656 | 506 |
| 5 | December 5, 2024 09:00 | December 6, 2024 00:45 | 15h 45m | 1,656 | 5,847 |
| 6 | October 28, 2024 13:15 | October 28, 2024 17:15 | 4h | 1,429 | 703 |
| 7 | August 31, 2024 19:30 | August 31, 2024 20:45 | 1h 15m | 1,277 | 1,221 |
| 8 | December 12, 2024 09:00 | December 12, 2024 10:45 | 1h 45m | 1,024 | 787 |
| 9 | November 29, 2024 11:45 | November 29, 2024 17:30 | 5h 45m | 748 | 1,335 |
| 10 | November 23, 2024 00:15 | November 23, 2024 10:15 | 10h | 554 | 1,132 |
Outage episodes by size in 2024: 32 reached 100+ customers, 8 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 Watauga 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blue Ridge Elec Member Corp - (NC) | 2024 | 100.6 hrs | 3.32 | 1.5 hrs | 1.26 |
| Mountain Electric Coop, Inc | 2024 | 2.8 hrs | 2.91 | 2.8 hrs | 2.91 |
| New River Light & Power Co | 2024 | 5.1 hrs | 1.52 | 18 min | 0.34 |
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 ÷ 18,248 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. Watauga County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Watauga 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/watauga-county