2024 data · 58 metros · 96.6M customers

The US Grid Reliability Report

We joined every US electric utility's 2024 reliability filing to the 58 metro areas we cover, and ranked them by how long the average customer actually spent without power. The gap between the best and worst city is 155-fold.

71.9 h

without power in Houston, TX — the worst metro we measured

155×

gap between Houston and New York, the most reliable

5 h

median metro — far below the 11 h national average

9/10

of the ten worst metros sit in the hurricane belt

What the data shows

The national average is misleading. The customer-weighted US average was 11 hours, but only 12 of 58 metros were worse than it. The median metro lost just 5 hours. A small number of catastrophic markets pull the mean far above what a typical American actually experiences — so "better than average" is a much weaker claim than it sounds.

Hurricanes dominate the top of the table. 9 of the ten worst metros are in Texas, Florida or the Southeast. Houston (71.9 h) reflects Hurricane Beryl; Tampa and Orlando reflect Helene and Milton. The exception is Cleveland, where severe storms rather than tropical systems drove the outages.

Dense urban grids perform best. New York (0.5 h) and Washington (0.5 h) lead the table. Heavily undergrounded networks in compact service areas avoid the overhead-line damage that drives multi-day outages elsewhere.

Frequency and duration are different problems. SAIFI counts how often the power goes out; SAIDI counts how long it stays out. A metro can be interrupted often but restored quickly. For deciding whether to buy backup power, duration is what matters — nobody buys a standby generator for a two-minute blink.

All 58 metros, ranked

# Metro Primary utility Hours out vs US Outages
1 Houston, TX CenterPoint Energy 71.9 6.5× 3.7
2 Tampa, FL TECO 70.7 6.4× 3.56
3 Orlando, FL Duke Energy / OUC 41.7 3.8× 2.21
4 Cleveland, OH FirstEnergy 32.0 2.9× 1.78
5 Charleston, SC Dominion Energy 31.8 2.9× 2.52
6 Columbia, SC Dominion Energy 31.8 2.9× 2.52
7 Raleigh, NC Duke Energy 30.1 2.7× 1.69
8 Charlotte, NC Duke Energy 27.1 2.5× 1.96
9 Atlanta, GA Georgia Power 25.3 2.3× 2.07
10 Savannah, GA Georgia Power 25.3 2.3× 2.07
11 Portland, OR Portland General Electric 12.9 1.2× 1.27
12 Miami, FL FPL 11.7 1.1× 1.04
13 Baton Rouge, LA Entergy 10.2 92% 2.04
14 New Orleans, LA Entergy 9.8 89% 2
15 Dallas, TX Oncor 8.9 80% 1.71
16 Buffalo, NY National Grid 8.5 77% 1.69
17 Bakersfield, CA PG&E / SCE 8.5 77% 2.15
18 Fresno, CA PG&E 8.5 77% 2.15
19 San Jose, CA PG&E 8.5 77% 2.15
20 Grand Rapids, MI Consumers Energy 8.4 76% 1.32
21 Detroit, MI DTE Energy 8.1 73% 1.25
22 Louisville, KY LG&E 7.2 66% 1.3
23 Kansas City, MO Evergy 6.7 61% 1.87
24 Denver, CO Xcel Energy 5.9 53% 1.68
25 Birmingham, AL Alabama Power 5.6 50% 2.04
26 Memphis, TN MLGW 5.5 49% 1.95
27 Seattle, WA Seattle City Light 5.4 49% 1.12
28 Cincinnati, OH Duke Energy 5.4 48% 1.04
29 Minneapolis, MN Xcel Energy 5.1 47% 1.47
30 Milwaukee, WI We Energies 4.9 45% 1.04
31 Oklahoma City, OK OG&E 4.8 43% 1.7
32 Columbus, OH AEP Ohio 4.5 41% 1.13
33 Indianapolis, IN AES Indiana 4.1 37% 1.25
34 Sacramento, CA SMUD / PG&E 3.8 34% 1.43
35 Des Moines, IA MidAmerican Energy 3.6 33% 1.27
36 Philadelphia, PA PECO 3.5 32% 0.97
37 Tulsa, OK PSO 3.1 28% 1.55
38 Pittsburgh, PA Duquesne Light 3.1 28% 0.99
39 Richmond, VA Dominion Energy 2.9 26% 1.36
40 Virginia Beach, VA Dominion Energy 2.9 26% 1.36
41 Hartford, CT Eversource 2.6 24% 0.89
42 San Diego, CA SDG&E 2.6 24% 0.61
43 St. Louis, MO Ameren 2.5 22% 0.77
44 Baltimore, MD BGE 2.2 20% 0.8
45 Chicago, IL ComEd 2.2 20% 0.68
46 Salt Lake City, UT Rocky Mountain Power 2.0 18% 1.07
47 Los Angeles, CA LADWP / SCE 1.9 17% 0.66
48 Providence, RI Rhode Island Energy 1.7 16% 0.9
49 Austin, TX Austin Energy 1.5 14% 0.96
50 Phoenix, AZ APS / SRP 1.5 13% 0.93
51 Boston, MA Eversource 1.3 12% 0.69
52 Riverside, CA SCE / Riverside Public Utilities 1.3 12% 0.61
53 Jacksonville, FL JEA 1.2 11% —
54 San Antonio, TX CPS Energy 1.2 11% 1.15
55 Las Vegas, NV NV Energy 1.2 11% 0.66
56 Colorado Springs, CO Colorado Springs Utilities 1.0 9% 0.87
57 Washington, DC Pepco 0.5 5% 0.27
58 New York, NY Con Edison 0.5 4% 0.13

Methodology

Figures come from EIA Form 861, Reliability file, the annual filing in which US electric utilities report distribution reliability. We take SAIDI — the average number of minutes a customer was without power across the year — for the primary utility serving each metro, and express it in hours.

We include major event days. Utilities report figures with and without "major event days" — hurricanes, ice storms and similar. We use the inclusive figure, because those events are precisely why a household buys backup power. Excluding them would measure a year that never happened.

The national comparison is EIA's own. The 11-hour US average (662.5 minutes) is the customer-weighted figure from EIA's state totals, covering 130 million customers — not a number we computed ourselves, so anyone can verify it in the source file.

Limitations, stated plainly. Utilities file under one of two methodologies (IEEE 1366 or a self-defined standard), and we take whichever each utility reported. Metros served by several utilities are represented by their largest; your own experience varies by neighbourhood and feeder. Two of our 60 metros are absent because their utilities filed no reliability data for 2024. And 2024 was an unusually severe year nationally — Hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton — so these figures run higher than a typical year.

Using this data

Free to cite and republish with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Journalists are welcome to the underlying numbers for any metro — including ones not listed here.

GridFree, "The 2024 US Grid Reliability Report," analysis of EIA Form 861, Reliability file. https://gogridfree.com/grid-reliability-report/

Questions or data requests: hello@gogridfree.com

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