County annual report · FIPS 30089
2025 Sanders County, MT Power Outage Report
In 2025, customers in Sanders County, MT went without power for an average of 25.8 hours, a total of 188K customer-hours (Montana average 6.8 hours). That ranks 5th worst of 51 Montana counties and 233rd of 3,000 nationally.
Compared with MT, the US and 2024
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of Montana customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Sanders County, 2025
The 10 outage episodes with the most customers out at once. Times are UTC.
| # | Started (UTC) | Ended (UTC) | Duration | Peak out | Customer-hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | December 17, 2025 13:00 | December 23, 2025 23:00 | 6d 10h | 6,903 | 155K |
| 2 | September 8, 2025 09:00 | September 8, 2025 12:30 | 3h 30m | 2,748 | 9,618 |
| 3 | December 8, 2025 18:00 | December 8, 2025 19:30 | 1h 30m | 2,674 | 2,438 |
| 4 | March 17, 2025 15:45 | March 17, 2025 17:15 | 1h 30m | 1,348 | 1,696 |
| 5 | October 29, 2025 14:15 | October 29, 2025 16:15 | 2h | 1,344 | 2,319 |
| 6 | March 26, 2025 19:15 | March 26, 2025 20:30 | 1h 15m | 1,223 | 1,399 |
| 7 | February 6, 2025 03:30 | February 6, 2025 07:15 | 3h 45m | 886 | 1,602 |
| 8 | August 20, 2025 22:30 | August 21, 2025 01:15 | 2h 45m | 818 | 1,433 |
| 9 | June 11, 2025 21:45 | June 11, 2025 23:30 | 1h 45m | 814 | 643 |
| 10 | December 26, 2025 21:00 | December 26, 2025 23:00 | 2h | 801 | 956 |
Outage episodes by size in 2025: 22 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 Sanders County reported on EIA Form 861 for 2025, 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 2025; 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, 2025, 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/2025/montana/sanders-county