Southwestern Electric Power Co

What This Utility Data Tells You

Southwestern Electric Power Co is an investor-owned utility operating in Arkansas under EIA identifier 17698. It reports service to approximately 234,806 customer accounts and generated about $0.71 billion in annual electric revenue, with a service footprint spanning 358 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 Southwestern Electric Power Co customer experienced 584.2 minutes of power interruptions, a metric called SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index). Excluding major weather events from that total, that sits within the 120–180 minute national benchmark range, indicating performance typical of U.S. distribution utilities. SAIFI, the average number of outage events per customer, was 2.09 for the same period, so customers statistically faced roughly 2 distinct interruptions that year. Strip out major event days (hurricanes, ice storms) and SAIDI falls to 195.1 minutes; the difference from the headline 584.2 shows how much of the outage total came from weather rather than everyday grid issues.

The EIA dataset includes 4 years of continuous reporting (2020–2023) for Southwestern Electric Power Co, which lets you see whether reliability is trending up or down rather than judging from a single snapshot. Over that span, SAIDI rose from 354.2 to 584.2 minutes, possibly reflecting tougher weather years or grid upgrades that have not caught up yet.