We mapped America's grid, county by county
Cole AshmanMost everyone who’s experienced a big power outage or surprise high power bill is left wondering: Anomaly or the new norm?
The data exists. So we built the answer. America’s Grid Health maps power outages for every county in the country back to 2013, and electricity prices back to 2019. The trends are pretty clear. And they might surprise you!
What the data says
Power bills went up almost everywhere. But not as much as you’d think, relative to inflation.
Since 2019, 97% of counties saw their bill as-delivered go up. Adjusted for inflation, only 41% actually got more expensive. For the typical county, the bill is ~20% higher while the inflation-adjusted price is down 1.8%. Both of those are true at the same time, which is why nobody ever wins the argument about electricity costs.
The typical county pays 15.2¢ per kWh, but the spread is enormous.
The median household power bill runs about $142 a month. In New Mexico it’s $99. In Hawaii it’s a whopping $226. The gap in the rate itself is wider still: 45.6¢ per kWh in Hawaii against 15.1¢ in New Mexico, three times the price for the same kilowatt-hour.
Outages are indeed getting worse.
The typical county lost 5.8 hours of power per year over 2019-2024, up from 4.1 in the six years before. 65% of counties got worse, 21% held roughly steady, and only 15% improved.
Most of those outage hours show up on a handful of days.
In the typical county, 61% of outage hours come from major storms rather than ordinary grid breakdown, and in 76% of counties storms are more than half the problem.
The two problems stack together.
In 30% of counties, prices rose in real terms and outages got worse. That is nearly 1-in-3 American counties paying more for a grid that performs worse than it used to.
Look up your county
Note: Outage reporting is patchy in places, so some counties come up empty. For the data nerds, method and sources are at the bottom of the map page.
