Top 10 US Utilities by Best Reliability Performance (Lowest SAIDI)

PlainUtility ranks utilities by reliability (lowest SAIDI). Live SSR query joining utilities to the most recent year of reliability filings.

Research period: 2026-05-16

Compiled byPlainUtility, Independent utility-reliability data desk · June 13, 2026

Research question

Among utilities reporting reliability metrics to the EIA, which deliver the shortest average annual outage duration, and how does the leadership tier compare to the national distribution?

Methodology

This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.

Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.

Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.

Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.

Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.

Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.

See the methodology page for the complete data-update process, source vintage, and field definitions.

The ranked top 10

Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.

#	Utility	State	Year	SAIDI (min)	SAIFI (events)	Customers
1	A & N Electric Coop	VA	2,021	1.2	0.002	36,997
2	North East Mississippi EPA	MS	2,021	1.947	0.649	28,837
3	A & N Electric Coop	VA	2,022	2.525	0.019	36,997
4	City of Burbank Water and Power	CA	2,022	4.54	0.223	53,729
5	A & N Electric Coop	VA	2,023	5.502	0.045	36,997
6	Meriwether Lewis Electric Coop	TN	2,022	5.834	2.692	36,203
7	Meriwether Lewis Electric Coop	TN	2,021	6.184	2.399	36,203
8	Dixie Escalante R E A, Inc	AZ	2,022	6.587	0.06	28,009
9	Alameda Municipal Power	CA	2,023	6.69	0.031	37,050
10	City of Grand Island - (NE)	NE	2,022	8.029	0.229	26,744

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. U.S. Energy Information Administration, EIA Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.

Findings

Top entity in the ranking

The top-ranked record in this dataset is A & N Electric Coop, with a value of 1.2 on the SAIDI (min) column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the source agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.

Distribution shape

The gap between the top-ranked record (1.2) and the 10th-ranked record (8.029) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.

Aggregate context

Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.

Source provenance

The records in this ranking originate from U.S. Energy Information Administration, specifically the EIA Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report. PlainUtility ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.

Why this ranking matters

Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.

What this analysis cannot tell us

Reliability filings to the EIA include or exclude Major Event Days (MEDs) per operator preference under IEEE Std 1366; very low SAIDI values may reflect aggressive MED exclusion rather than actual operational excellence. The customer-count floor of 25,000 in this query excludes small co-ops and municipal systems where a single outage event distorts annual SAIDI on small denominators. The most-recent-year-available varies by utility, some filed 2023 data, others 2022, depending on operator submission cadence. SAIDI and SAIFI capture sustained interruptions per the operator's chosen duration threshold (typically ≥5 minutes) and do not capture momentary interruptions that affect customer power quality. Comparison across service territories is complicated by underlying geographic differences, utility A serving dense urban load with underground feeders structurally outperforms utility B serving rural overhead lines through forest. Reliability filings are operator self-reports without third-party verification.

Sources

U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form 861 Annual Electric Power Industry Report - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/
IEEE Standard 1366 Guide for Electric Power Distribution Reliability Indices - https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/1366/