About OutageRiskCheck
Why this exists
Search "do I need a generator" and almost every answer comes from someone selling one. None of them start from the one number that should decide it: how often your own utility actually loses power, and for how long. Every sizeable US electric utility already reports exactly that to the federal government each year. OutageRiskCheck puts that filing in front of you, utility by utility, and translates it into a plain answer about backup power.
What goes into the number
Each utility page reports the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Form 861 reliability file for 2025: average outage minutes per customer (SAIDI), average number of outages per customer (SAIFI), and average length of one outage (CAIDI). 964 utility-state records carry figures. How they are turned into a verdict is laid out in the methodology guide.
A filed record, honestly labeled
These are utility-wide averages for one year, reported by the utility itself. Your own street can be better or worse than the average - a house at the end of a long rural feeder line will usually see more outages than one near a substation. Every page says so, and nothing here claims to predict when your power will go out next.
Who runs this
OutageRiskCheck is an independently run site. It is not affiliated with the EIA, any electric utility, or any generator, battery, or installation company. If a page ever carries a sponsored link, that is disclosed on the page itself and in the privacy policy.
Written by
Each utility page is generated by AI software from the cited EIA data - no journalist or editor writes or reviews a page before it publishes. The reliability figures themselves come from the utilities' own federal filings, not from AI; the AI only assembles the sentences around them.