County annual report · FIPS 37021
2025 Buncombe County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2025, customers in Buncombe County, NC went without power for an average of 21.0 hours, a total of 682K customer-hours (North Carolina average 9.8 hours). That ranks 21st worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 326th of 3,000 nationally.
Compared with NC, the US and 2024
Coverage line is EAGLE-I's share of North Carolina customers tracked each year.
Biggest outages in Buncombe 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 | May 16, 2025 22:00 | May 19, 2025 05:15 | 2d 7h | 20,155 | 88K |
| 2 | March 15, 2025 20:00 | March 18, 2025 04:45 | 2d 8h | 15,830 | 116K |
| 3 | August 8, 2025 13:15 | August 9, 2025 00:15 | 11h | 4,944 | 1,338 |
| 4 | February 6, 2025 14:45 | February 6, 2025 23:45 | 9h | 4,288 | 3,946 |
| 5 | May 5, 2025 03:15 | May 5, 2025 21:30 | 18h 15m | 3,888 | 2,179 |
| 6 | June 16, 2025 12:45 | June 20, 2025 18:15 | 4d 5h | 3,248 | 18K |
| 7 | January 1, 2025 00:00 | January 18, 2025 00:15 | 17d | 2,939 | 35K |
| 8 | February 21, 2025 02:45 | February 21, 2025 23:45 | 21h | 2,786 | 20K |
| 9 | June 27, 2025 20:30 | June 29, 2025 13:00 | 1d 16h | 2,549 | 5,130 |
| 10 | May 8, 2025 12:30 | May 9, 2025 08:45 | 20h 15m | 2,515 | 4,626 |
Outage episodes by size in 2025: 175 reached 100+ customers, 45 reached 1,000+ customers, 2 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 Buncombe 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Haywood Electric Member Corp | 2024 | 160.2 hrs | 6.66 | 9.4 hrs | 3.60 |
| 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 2025; utilities it does not see are not counted.
- Hours per customer = outage customer-minutes ÷ 32,499 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. Buncombe County has data for 2015–2025.
Cite this report
MassOutage (massoutage.com), Buncombe County, NC 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/north-carolina/buncombe-county