Volunteer Electric Coop

What This Utility Data Tells You

Volunteer Electric Coop is a member-owned electric cooperative operating in Tennessee under EIA identifier 19898. It reports service to approximately 126,279 customer accounts and generated about $0.27 billion in annual electric revenue, with a service footprint spanning 70 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 Volunteer Electric Coop customer experienced 1056.7 minutes of power interruptions, the industry-standard SAIDI metric (System Average Interruption Duration Index). Excluding major weather events from that total, that is substantially above the 120–180 minute national benchmark, indicating either storm-prone geography, aging infrastructure, or extended restoration windows. Over the same period, SAIFI (outage events per customer) was 6.37, putting the typical customer at roughly 6 distinct interruptions that year. Once major event days (hurricanes, ice storms) are excluded, SAIDI comes down to 429.5 minutes, and the spread against the headline 1056.7 indicates how much weather, versus routine infrastructure, drove the outage total.

The EIA dataset includes 4 years of continuous reporting (2020–2023) for Volunteer Electric Coop, which lets you see whether reliability is trending up or down rather than judging from a single snapshot. Over that span, SAIDI rose from 271.5 to 1056.7 minutes, possibly reflecting tougher weather years or grid upgrades that have not caught up yet.