America's Grid Health

Sources

Prices come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration: Form EIA-861M for monthly state figures and Form EIA-861 for annual county figures. Outage hours come from the reliability schedule of the same annual form. Disaster counts and costs are NOAA NCEI's Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters; storm tracks are NOAA HURDAT2. Inflation adjustment uses CPI-U, expressed in 2026 dollars.

What the price figures measure

Total residential revenue divided by total residential kilowatt-hours: the average price households actually paid, across every rate plan and tier, including fixed charges and taxes. It is not a published tariff, and it moves with usage and weather as well as with rate cases.

Resolution and coverage

County figures are annual because EIA-861 is an annual survey. There is no monthly or ZIP-level price data. County prices are built from bundled sales, then scaled so each state's counties reconcile to its published retail price, a correction that is material only in restructured states. Where several utilities serve one county, each utility's revenue and volume is spread evenly across the counties it serves. In restructured states EIA records the same kilowatt-hours twice, so state figures de-duplicate the delivery volume.

Outage coverage is near-complete: about 690 utilities serving 130 million customers reported usable figures in 2024. Utilities self-report under IEEE 1366 or their own standard. The figure shown is SAIDI including major event days, converted to hours and weighted by customer count.

The forecast

The dotted line is EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook (July 2026), which projects residential prices for nine census divisions rather than for individual states. A state's forecast applies its division's growth rate to that state's 2025 actual. STEO has under-forecast residential prices in each of the last two cycles, by roughly 1% at six months and 5% at eighteen, so treat it as a floor rather than a midpoint. The inflation-adjusted forecast assumes 2.4% annual CPI, because STEO publishes prices as billed only. Counties are not forecast.

Disasters and storms

NOAA's event records carry a name, type, cost and death toll, but no coordinates, so events are plotted on the time axis rather than as pins on the map. Per-state counts come from NOAA's state series, in which one event is counted in every state it struck, so state counts sum well above the national total. Per-state costs are published as ranges, which makes the damage figures midpoint sums. NOAA retired the series after 2024; the 1980–2024 archive remains authoritative. Storm tracks are six-hourly best-track positions, drawn for single years only.

Why the change view compares six-year blocks

A single year's outage map is largely a map of that year's hurricanes: 2024 was Beryl, Helene and Milton. Comparing the 2019–2024 average against 2013–2018 is steadier. That comparison is drawn in absolute hours rather than percent, because a county moving from 0.4 to 2.0 hours is a 400% increase but only 1.6 hours.