Northern Plains Electric Coop

What This Utility Data Tells You

Northern Plains Electric Coop is a member-owned electric cooperative operating in North Dakota under EIA identifier 13196. It reports service to approximately 11,940 customer accounts and generated about $0.04 billion in annual electric revenue, with a service footprint spanning 93 ZIP codes. Being member-owned, this cooperative answers to its ratepayers rather than outside shareholders, a structure that tends to influence how rate cases and capital spending get decided.

In 2023, the average Northern Plains Electric Coop customer experienced 551.4 minutes of power interruptions, the industry-standard SAIDI metric (System Average Interruption Duration Index). That exceeds the 120–180 minute national benchmark by a wide margin, a pattern often tied to severe weather exposure, older infrastructure, or longer repair windows. The SAIFI figure, which tracks average outage events per customer, came in at 2.14 for the same period, meaning customers statistically saw about 2 distinct interruptions that year. Excluding major event days (hurricanes, ice storms), SAIDI drops to 372.4 minutes, the gap between that figure and the headline 551.4 reveals how much weather, not day-to-day infrastructure, drove outages.

Northern Plains Electric Coop 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 331.3 to 551.4 minutes over that window, a shift that can point to worsening weather exposure or delayed grid modernization.