BENCO Electric Cooperative

What This Utility Data Tells You

BENCO Electric Cooperative is a member-owned electric cooperative operating in Minnesota under EIA identifier 1884. It reports service to approximately 19,764 customer accounts and generated about $0.05 billion in annual electric revenue, with a service footprint spanning 38 ZIP codes. As a cooperative, its governance is accountable to its ratepayer-members rather than shareholders, which often shapes rate-setting and reinvestment priorities.

In 2023, the average BENCO Electric Cooperative customer experienced 128.3 minutes of power interruptions, a metric called SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index). That places this utility well below the 120–180 minute national benchmark, signaling strong grid hardening and fast restoration practices. SAIFI, the average number of outage events per customer, was 1.00 for the same period, so customers statistically faced roughly 1 distinct interruption that year. Excluding major event days (hurricanes, ice storms), SAIDI drops to 80.2 minutes, the gap between that figure and the headline 128.3 reveals how much weather, not day-to-day infrastructure, drove outages.

BENCO Electric Cooperative has 4 years of continuous EIA reporting on file (2020–2023), enough to read a real trend rather than a single-year snapshot. SAIDI dropped from 142.7 to 128.3 minutes across that span, a direction regulators and prospective customers tend to watch closely.