How Bad and Frequent Are Power Outages in Texas Really?

When it comes to keeping the lights on, not all states are created equal. Some are powerhouses of reliability, while others always seem to be making headlines over the frequency or duration of their power outages. Press coverage is one thing, though. Underlying data is another.

Now, I don’t want to name any names, and I’m also not going to pretend to be a statistician of any kind, but there are a lot of story pitches from industry folks that end up in my inbox that purport to rank states or locales based on industry data sourced from private companies.

The point of such an exercise on their end is to generate a clickable headline and get their company linked in the body of the article. All’s fair in marketing after all, and who am I to question proprietary data that I don’t necessarily have the right (or time) to dig through myself?

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Every now and again, though, a story pitch will come in pointing to publicly-available information as the source material. The pitch might also make some claims based on said data.

Texas obviously has a lot it needs to figure out when it comes to keeping its electric grid humming in the face of extreme weather (and the growing number of energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining operations). But would you believe that in 2023, the average Texan experienced more than 500 hours in power outages?

I didn’t either. Then again, I could absolutely be missing something. After all, I’m not a statistician, and government websites aren’t always the easiest to navigate. In any case, if I were ranking states on electric reliability using 2023 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (USEIA), I would say the Lone Star State leaves a lot to be desired — but it’s also not the worst by any means.

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USEIA tracks data reported by utility companies to measure “distribution system reliability.” Essentially, they calculate the average length of a “non-momentary electric interruption” and the average frequency of such an event. The agency also factors whether a reporting utility abides by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) definition of a “major event day.” You’ll get what I mean.

According to USEIA, the average Texan suffered 496.2 minutes of electric interruption in 2023. The average outage was 281.5 minutes, and the average annual frequency was 1.763. These figures include major event days and utility providers who do and do not use the IEEE definition of such days. For comparison, Texans logged 1,175.3 minutes of outage in 2021, the year the Snowpocalypse (or Winter Storm Uri) crippled broad swaths of the grid for days.

So, how did Texas stack up in 2023? It came in 12th when ranked by average total minutes for the year. Not great, but hardly the worst, and certainly not hundreds of hours. The states that clocked more minutes in descending order were: Maine (1,863), Michigan (1,093.6), Arkansas (911.2), Oklahoma (896.6), Kentucky (868.2), Tennessee (857.9), Mississippi (802.1), West Virginia (751.5), Vermont (744.4), New Hampshire (645.8), and Louisiana (584.2).

You get some different figures and a different ranking when excluding non-IEEE data — Texas moves to 11th place — but the point stands. At least according to the USEIA, Texas isn’t really one of the worst states when it comes to electric reliability. And maybe be wary of any reports out there assigning it hundreds of hours in power outages on average.

Again, I could be missing something entirely. I reached out to the individual who sent the story pitch and will report back here (or offer a big old correction) when I learn more about the methodology behind their assertions about the Lone Star State.