Electric reliability is a key advantage of public power. Based on the data submitted to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, public power utilities consistently are more reliable than other types of electric utilities. Looking at data from 2013-2023, customers of public power utilities experience the fewest minutes of outage time and fewer outages than customers of investor-owned utilities or cooperatives.
National Averages
Acronyms
CAIDI: Customer Average Interruption Duration Index
MED: Major Event Day
SAIDI: System Average Interruption Duration Index
SAIFI: System Average Interruption Frequency Index
Data by State and Utility
Electric utilities in the U.S. report outage information to the EIA each year through Form EIA-861. Members of APPA can use our simple spreadsheet tool to compare the annual EIA reliability data at the national, state, and utility level. All utility territories, state, and political subdivisions have been reclassified as “municipal” for this analysis. To access the average reliability data at the national and state levels on each spreadsheet, go to the “Data Selector” tab and select the desired state in cell F25. The “Reliability_states_ownership” tab provides data grouped by state and utility ownership, while the “Raw-data” tab offers data for individual utilities. If you reside in a state that does not have utilities of each ownership type (public power, cooperatives, investor owned) or does not have utilities that are large enough to be required to submit Form EIA-861 containing reliability information, then the presented numbers in the ‘Data Selector’ tab will show up as zeros. In addition, where a state does not use a particular type of analysis (for example no use of the IEEE Standard), those numbers will also show up as zero.
Select the year of data to review
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2013 - 2015
The original data from Form EIA-861 is publicly available on EIA’s website.
Submitting Form EIA-861 and EIA-861S
Utilities submit data electronically using EIA’s secure internet data collection system (e-file). Please find the methods for filing a response on the first page of the Form EIA-861 Instructions. If your utility intends to complete or has already completed the EIA-861S (short form), then you do not need to submit Form EIA-861. The EIA 861S is essentially a shorter version of Form EIA-861 and does not include reliability data. To check if you are required to file the EIA-861S, please review the “Required Respondents” information on the first page of the Form EIA-861S Instructions. The EIA also has FAQ on completing Form EIA-861.
Contact our team at [email protected] with any questions.