Local reporting questions, national reliability trends, and lessons from major blackouts. Each article links to the underlying utility, government, or laboratory evidence and explains what it can establish.
Original research briefs by the power-outage.org. Historical event analysis is dated separately from the site’s live outage feeds.
EIA’s 2025 reliability figures improved sharply from 2024. We examine the numbers, reporting methods, and what a national average can tell an individual customer.
Wildfire shutoffs, rapid protective trips, and ordinary equipment outages can look similar on a map. Their causes and evidence requirements differ.
Santa Clara County contains several electricity providers. We examine why a county outage total cannot establish the status of Santa Clara, Palo Alto, or an address.
Corona’s city electric utility and Southern California Edison have different roles. Official service-area records explain which outage information an address needs.
Federal investigations of Winter Storm Uri show how freezing equipment, fuel constraints, and electric-system operations interacted during the Texas blackout.
The Elliott investigation shows why cold-weather electricity reliability depends on fuel infrastructure, forecasts, and coordination as well as individual power plants.
DOE snapshots and CenterPoint’s restoration record show why peak outages, customers restored, and the last unresolved connections must be measured separately.
Helene’s inland outages involved destroyed electrical infrastructure and damaged access routes. Dated NOAA and Duke Energy records explain the recovery constraints.
New York’s underground electrical system still depends on cables, substations, protection, and operating decisions. The 2019 Manhattan outage illustrates why.
Customer units, geographic precision, timestamps, missing coverage, and repeated observations explain why outage maps and historical charts can disagree.