City of Ames, IA
How often City of Ames goes out
This is one of the steadier grids on file: City of Ames's Iowa customers went without power for only 21 minutes across 0.4 separate outages last year. That is 86% less outage time than the Iowa state average of 2.5 hours a year.
What a typical outage at City of Ames looks like
A single outage here averages 54 minutes. That is squarely in battery-power-station range; a fuel generator is overkill for most of these. More on that split in how often versus how long an outage runs.
Do City of Ames customers need a generator
Serving 27,665 customers here, With a record this steady, City of Ames customers rarely have a reason to shop for a backup generator at all.
The source behind this number
These figures come from EIA Form 861, the reliability report a municipally-owned utility like City of Ames files with federal regulators every year - serving 27,665 customers hereaveraged across the whole territory, not any one address or storm. Want the Iowa average instead of just this one utility? Iowa's statewide record is here. One big storm can move a single year a lot; major event days explains how.