Watertown Municipal Utilities

What This Utility Data Tells You

Watertown Municipal Utilities is a municipally-owned utility operating in South Dakota under EIA identifier 20187. It reports service to approximately 13,993 customer accounts and generated about $0.03 billion in annual electric revenue, with a service footprint spanning 1 ZIP code. As a municipal utility, it is typically governed by a local board or city council and is exempt from federal income tax.

In 2023, the average Watertown Municipal Utilities customer experienced 7.4 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 0.10 for the same period, so customers statistically faced roughly 0 distinct interruptions that year. Excluding major event days (hurricanes, ice storms), SAIDI drops to 7.4 minutes — the gap between that figure and the headline 7.4 reveals how much weather, not day-to-day infrastructure, drove outages.

The EIA dataset includes 4 years of continuous reporting (2020–2023) for Watertown Municipal Utilities, which lets you see whether reliability is trending up or down rather than judging from a single snapshot. SAIDI has improved from 14.9 to 7.4 minutes over that window — a meaningful direction for prospective customers and regulators watching capital investment outcomes. All figures on this page come directly from EIA Form 861, the federal annual electric power industry survey, with service territory ZIPs sourced from OpenEI — you can cross-reference them with your own utility bill or use them when comparing providers before relocating.