States with the Worst Electric Outages

Three structural drivers of high SAIDI

The states at the top of this list (highest outage minutes) share a recurring pattern: storm exposure is the dominant factor. Hurricane-prone Gulf and Atlantic coast states (Florida, Louisiana, Texas), ice-storm-prone Appalachian states (West Virginia, Kentucky), and wildfire-exposed western states all post SAIDI averages well above the 120–180 minute national benchmark. The second driver is territory geography: cooperative-heavy states with long rural distribution lines covering forested terrain take longer to restore after a single tree-on-line event because the average crew has to travel farther to reach each fault. The third driver is infrastructure age and undergrounding ratio: jurisdictions where most distribution lines remain overhead — and where the average pole age is 50+ years — experience higher equipment-failure rates per 1,000 customers.

A subtler driver is regulatory framework. States where the public utility commission ties rate-case outcomes explicitly to SAIDI / SAIFI performance targets create financial incentives that drive utilities to prioritize reliability spending. States where reliability is treated as a softer obligation — or where the PUC is structurally captured by a single dominant utility — see less aggressive grid hardening even when the engineering case is clear. The most-reliable states tend to combine favorable geography, scale-advantaged ownership, and reliability-linked rate-case mechanics; the worst-performing states tend to inherit hostile geography and weaker regulatory pressure.

Maine is the perpetual outlier

Maine's SAIDI consistently runs an order of magnitude higher than any other state in the EIA data — roughly 2,961 minutes per year against a 120–180 minute national benchmark. The reason is structural: Maine combines all three drivers above (severe weather including ice storms and nor'easters, an extensive rural cooperative network, and aging overhead infrastructure across heavily forested terrain) plus historically intermittent reporting from smaller cooperatives that can skew the state weighted average upward. The Maine PUC has acknowledged the gap and continues to track utility-by-utility performance through periodic reliability dockets.

Maine's situation also illustrates a measurement caveat that applies broadly: when a state's SAIDI weighted-average is dominated by one or two large utilities with severe storm-year reporting, a single bad winter can move the state ranking by several positions. Single-year SAIDI snapshots can mislead — multi-year rolling averages give a better picture of underlying grid health than headline numbers from any one EIA release.

How to read this list

The state-level SAIDI is a weighted average across all reporting utilities — but utility-level performance varies widely within any given state. A municipal utility serving a downtown business district may post a SAIDI under 60 minutes while a rural cooperative covering 4,000 square miles in the same state averages 400+ minutes. Click any state name above to see every reporting utility in that state, with their individual SAIDI / SAIFI metrics. Cross-reference against the most-reliable ranking to see how state averages compare in the opposite direction. For a deeper understanding of how SAIDI and SAIFI are computed and what each metric does and does not tell you, see our SAIDI/SAIFI explainer and our methodology.

For homeowners considering a move, a high state SAIDI is a useful but coarse signal — the meaningful number is the SAIDI of the specific utility that will serve your future address, which is often very different from the state average. Use our utility lookup to find that figure for any US service address, and pair it with our guide on how outage history affects home insurance if you are evaluating coverage trade-offs in a new market.

One more interpretation tip: when comparing back-to-back EIA releases for the same state, watch for changes in the count of reporting utilities. A state that suddenly looks worse year-over-year may simply have a new round of small cooperatives reporting reliability for the first time, dragging the weighted average upward. Conversely, an improvement may reflect a few small utilities dropping out of the dataset rather than any actual grid investment. The most reliable read on whether a state is genuinely getting better or worse is to track the same set of utilities (same EIA IDs) across consecutive releases and recompute the average over the constant cohort.