County annual report · FIPS 37189
2025 Watauga County, NC Power Outage Report
In 2025, customers in Watauga County, NC went without power for an average of 10.4 hours, a total of 189K customer-hours (North Carolina average 9.8 hours). That ranks 41st worst of 94 North Carolina counties and 773rd 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 Watauga 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 | February 12, 2025 02:00 | February 13, 2025 20:15 | 1d 18h | 5,711 | 85K |
| 2 | March 16, 2025 06:30 | March 17, 2025 23:45 | 1d 17h | 4,795 | 21K |
| 3 | April 21, 2025 20:45 | April 22, 2025 01:00 | 4h 15m | 3,595 | 3,659 |
| 4 | August 19, 2025 19:45 | August 19, 2025 22:30 | 2h 45m | 2,926 | 1,468 |
| 5 | February 16, 2025 13:00 | February 17, 2025 02:00 | 13h | 2,146 | 3,847 |
| 6 | January 1, 2025 06:45 | January 1, 2025 12:30 | 5h 45m | 1,741 | 2,317 |
| 7 | February 13, 2025 21:45 | February 16, 2025 00:00 | 2d 2h | 1,615 | 19K |
| 8 | May 4, 2025 03:00 | May 4, 2025 03:30 | 30m | 1,447 | 724 |
| 9 | June 17, 2025 08:15 | June 17, 2025 09:15 | 1h | 1,362 | 1,362 |
| 10 | June 17, 2025 22:00 | June 18, 2025 00:00 | 2h | 1,362 | 1,026 |
Outage episodes by size in 2025: 54 reached 100+ customers, 15 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 Watauga 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 2025; 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, 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/watauga-county