Montana

What This State's Utility Data Tells You

Montana has 7 electric utilities reporting to the federal EIA Form 861 survey, of which 7 file full SAIDI and SAIFI reliability metrics. Together these providers serve approximately 0.7 million customer accounts, spanning investor-owned utilities (IOUs), member-owned rural cooperatives, and municipally-owned systems — each with different governance models, rate-setting processes, and reinvestment patterns that shape reliability outcomes on the ground.

The statewide average SAIDI — the mean number of minutes a typical customer spends without power each year — is 190.6 minutes across utilities with reporting data. That falls within the 120–180 minute national benchmark range, indicating performance typical of U.S. distribution utilities. The average SAIFI — the number of outage events per customer per year — is 1.30, meaning Montana customers statistically face about one interruption per year on average. Excluding major event days (hurricanes, ice storms, wildfires), the SAIDI figure drops to 185.2 minutes — the gap between that and the headline 190.6 shows how much weather, rather than day-to-day infrastructure, drives outage time in Montana.

Within Montana, reliability varies widely: the best-performing utility reports SAIDI of 102.5 minutes while the worst reports 390.5 minutes — a 3.8× spread that typically reflects the difference between dense urban distribution grids and long, rural feeder lines. This kind of within-state variation matters when you're deciding where to relocate, choosing between service territories, or comparing reliability against a home-insurance quote. All figures on this page come directly from EIA Form 861, the federal annual electric power industry survey — use the ranked table below to look up specific providers and review their multi-year SAIDI, SAIFI, and customer-count trends.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes the EIA Form 861 dataset every June, covering all licensed electric distribution utilities across the United States. Each utility self-reports interruption duration and frequency under definitions standardized by IEEE Standard 1366; the agency cross-validates the submissions against retail-sales volume and customer counts before release. Major event days, typically severe weather, are reported in a separate column and excluded from the headline SAIDI and SAIFI to keep year-over-year reliability comparisons meaningful. Use these state-level averages as a starting point, then check each provider's underlying multi-year submission on the federal portal before drawing conclusions about a specific utility.