Editorial & Corrections Policy

PlainUtility turns the U.S. Energy Information Administration's published reliability data — the SAIDI and SAIFI outage metrics electric utilities file each year on EIA Form 861 — into readable per-utility and per-state pages. This page explains how those pages are produced, the standards we hold them to, and exactly how to flag a number that looks wrong.

How Pages Are Produced

PlainUtility's utility, state, and ranking pages are generated from a published federal dataset: EIA Form 861, the annual Electric Power Industry Report that distribution utilities file with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. We download the reliability tables directly from EIA, load them into a structured database, and render every page from that database. The figures you see — a utility's SAIDI (average outage minutes per customer per year), SAIFI (average outages per customer per year), the with- and without-major-event values, customer counts, and the multi-year trend — are EIA's reported numbers, not hand-typed and not estimated by us.

This is a data-publishing model: the same template renders hundreds of pages so that every reporting utility and state is covered consistently. We are transparent that these data pages are produced programmatically from the source dataset rather than written individually. The editorial work goes into the pipeline — how data is sourced, normalized, and computed — into the methodology, and into the written guides; not into hand-authoring hundreds of near-identical utility pages, which would add no accuracy and invite inconsistency.

Sourcing Standards

  • Primary sources only. Reliability figures come from EIA Form 861, the federal annual electric-power industry survey, as documented in our methodology. ZIP-code-to-utility mapping comes from OpenEI's utility-rate database.
  • Attribution in context. Each data page names its dataset (EIA Form 861) and the reporting years near the figures, and links to the methodology that explains how SAIDI and SAIFI are defined under IEEE Standard 1366.
  • Derived values are labeled. Numbers we compute ourselves — state averages, rankings, and percentile context — are presented as our analysis of EIA data, distinct from the values utilities report. State averages are computed across the utilities that report reliability in that state.
  • No invented data. Reliability reporting is voluntary in EIA-861, so not every utility files every year. Where a value is unavailable, the page says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate. We publish data for the utilities that filed reliability metrics, not a guess for those that did not.

Update Cadence

EIA publishes Form 861 once per year, typically in the autumn for the prior calendar year. The data currently on the site spans 2020 through 2023. When EIA releases a new annual file we refresh our database and recompute derived metrics. Between releases the figures are stable because the source itself does not change. The reporting years are shown on every data page so you can see which release a page is based on.

Corrections Process

If a figure on PlainUtility looks wrong, please tell us. Because our pages are generated from EIA's dataset, a genuine error almost always traces back to either the source data or our processing of it — so this is how we handle a report:

  1. Report. Email hello@plainutility.com or use the contact page with the page URL and the number that looks off.
  2. Verify. We compare the figure against EIA's published Form 861 data for that utility, state, and year.
  3. Fix at the source. If the value is wrong on our side, we correct it in the database and pipeline that generate the page — not just on the single page — so every affected page is fixed at once. If the figure faithfully reflects EIA's published data, we explain that and, where useful, add context.
  4. Note it. Corrections that change a published figure are reflected the next time the page rebuilds, with the data reporting years shown.

We aim to acknowledge data-error reports within a few business days.

Editorial Independence

PlainUtility is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with the U.S. Energy Information Administration, any electric utility, or any regulator. We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any utility or other covered entity. Our only revenue is contextual display advertising; advertisers do not influence which utilities or states we cover or how we present data. Our rankings are computed mechanically from EIA figures, so no utility can pay to move up — or down — a list.

Appropriate Use

PlainUtility is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional, engineering, financial, or legal advice. SAIDI and SAIFI are historical, system-average reliability indices for a utility as a whole; they describe past performance across all customers, not a forecast for any specific address, neighborhood, or future year. For decisions that depend on power reliability, confirm current conditions with the utility and consult a qualified professional. See our full appropriate-use disclaimer.