Empire District Electric Co

What This Utility Data Tells You

Empire District Electric Co is an investor-owned utility operating in Arkansas under EIA identifier 5860. It reports service to approximately 165,360 customer accounts and generated about $0.57 billion in annual electric revenue, with a service footprint spanning 137 ZIP codes. Because it is investor-owned, the state public utility commission oversees its rate cases and reliability performance rather than a local board.

In 2023, the average Empire District Electric Co customer experienced 303.4 minutes of power interruptions, a metric called SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index). Excluding major weather events from that total, that is comfortably under the 120–180 minute national benchmark range, a sign of solid grid resilience and quick outage response. Over the same period, SAIFI (outage events per customer) was 2.61, putting the typical customer at roughly 3 distinct interruptions that year. Excluding major event days (hurricanes, ice storms), SAIDI drops to 85.3 minutes, the gap between that figure and the headline 303.4 reveals how much weather, not day-to-day infrastructure, drove outages.

Empire District Electric Co has 4 years of continuous EIA reporting on file (2020–2023), enough to read a real trend rather than a single-year snapshot. SAIDI climbed from 23.4 to 303.4 minutes over that window, a shift that can point to worsening weather exposure or delayed grid modernization.