U.S. electricity customers experienced an average of 11 hours of power outages in 2024, nearly twice as many as the annual average across the previous decade, according to a new report from the Energy Information Administration.
Hurricanes accounted for 80% of those lost hours, with most of last year’s outages resulting from major weather events like hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton, EIA said in the report released Monday.
“Interruptions attributed to major events averaged nearly nine hours in 2024, compared with an average of nearly four hours per year in 2014 through 2023,” EIA said. “Service interruptions that aren’t triggered by major events routinely average about two hours per year.”
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Courtesy of Energy Information Administration
Customers in South Carolina were significant outliers in terms of outage duration, the report said, experiencing an average of 53 hours of outages in 2024. Much of this was due to last September’s Hurricane Helene, which left 1.2 million customers in South Carolina without electricity.
The report appears to build on a growing body of evidence that extreme weather is taking a heavier toll on the electric power system in parts of the country. In October, JD Power released a report that found the average length of the longest outages are getting longer and concluded that disasters have become a “fact of life” for many utility customers.
Helene, in particular, caused severe damage to utility systems in the U.S. Southeast and Mid-Atlantic.
Duke Energy said after the hurricane that transmission infrastructure in upstate South Carolina “was severely damaged and, in many cases, destroyed” and would need to be entirely rebuilt.
Three days after the hurricane struck, 900,000 Duke customers remained without power across North Carolina and South Carolina, the utility said. Following hurricanes Helene and Milton, Duke reported needing to replace around 16,000 transformers — more transformers than utilities generally require in an entire year, WoodMac Senior Analyst Ben Boucher said in February.
South Carolina, along with North Carolina and Florida, “dealt with strong winds and flooding from Hurricane Helene that affected transmission and distribution power lines as well as substations leading to prolonged power outages,” EIA said. The following month, Hurricane Milton “left 3.4 million customers in Florida without power,” it added.
“In contrast, customers in states such as Arizona, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Massachusetts experienced, on average, less than two hours of service interruptions in 2024,” EIA said
While Hawaii averaged less than 10 hours of total outages throughout the year, the state saw more frequent interruptions — an average of 4.4 interruptions per customer, compared to the U.S. average of 1.5, “mainly due to adverse weather, volcanic activity, unexpected outages at oil-fired plants, and issues connecting new generating capacity,” EIA said.
