A record of the dark

Utility outage maps show what is happening right now. Power Out Map shows what has happened, for every county, since 2015.

Thousands of outage maps are published every day and thrown away the next. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been quietly saving them every fifteen minutes for a decade, 232,535,445 readings in all. Power Out Map turns that record into something you can read: how many hours a year the power is out where you live, which storms did it, how long the worst ones lasted, how fast the power came back, and which utilities keep the lights on.

What it is not

It is not a live outage map, and it gives no advice. Pages describe what the records show; they do not predict the next outage or recommend what to buy. The record misses short outages and some small utilities, so every figure is a floor.

Corrections

If a number looks wrong for a place you know, it may be. The methodology lists the known limits of the record. The site is rebuilt whenever a new year of records is published.