Most power outage APIs tell you where the power is out. GridProfile's tells you which houses: it returns the street addresses that lost power, with the outage attached.
In the 30 days to September 8, 2026, that covered 562,287 outages from 214 utilities across 2,307 counties, resolved against 141 million address points. The median outage reaches our database 19 minutes after it starts.
What does a power outage API return?
Most power outage APIs return outages by area: a county, a utility's service territory, or the outage shape a utility draws on its map. That answers "where is the power out?" and leaves you to work out who lives there.
GridProfile's power outage API goes one step further and returns one record per address that lost power.
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
address_line, city, state, zip |
The street address. CASS and route coding stay on your side. |
lat, lon |
The point, for mapping or radius filters. |
county_fips |
The county the address sits in. |
outage_start, outage_end, duration_hours |
When the power went out, when it came back, and how long that was. |
customers_affected |
The size of the outage this address belongs to. |
outages_in_window |
How many separate outages hit this address in the window you asked for. |
utility |
Who serves the address. |
cause |
Storm, tree, equipment, animal or vehicle, when the utility publishes one. |
record_id |
A stable ID for dedupe and reconciliation. |
No names, phone numbers or emails. Contact data carries consent and TCPA exposure we don't take on, and an address is enough to mail, visit, or match against a file you already license.
How do you know which houses actually lost power?
From the utility's own footprint. About 17% of outages come with the utility's outage polygon, and there the records are the addresses inside it.
The rest publish a point and a customer count, so we return the nearest homes up to that count, inside a hard distance cap. A 12-customer outage returns 12 addresses.
Which power outage APIs are available?
Four are worth knowing in the U.S., and each answers a different question.
| API | What it returns | Freshness | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|
| DOE ODIN | Customers out by county, from participating utilities | Near real time | Public research and emergency management |
| PowerOutage.us | Customers out by utility, county and city, plus outage shapes | Every 10 minutes | Monitoring, alerts and reporting |
| Gisual | Power status for the sites you monitor | Near real time | Telecom network operations centers |
| GridProfile | The street addresses inside each outage, with start, end, duration and customers affected | Median 19 minutes after outage start | Mail, sales and service at the affected homes |
ODIN is the federal feed, built from utilities that volunteer their data, and it stops at the county. PowerOutage.us (with its sister site PowerOutage.com) has the widest monitoring footprint and city-level history going partly back to 2016. Gisual answers one narrow question well: is a site's trouble a utility outage?
If you need to act on the homes inside an outage, the address is the unit you need, and that's the gap GridProfile's API fills.
Check each vendor's licence for your use as well. Some outage APIs are licensed for internal use only, which rules out putting the data into mail or services you sell to clients.
Is there a real-time power outage API?
Yes, though "real time" means different things. PowerOutage.us refreshes every 10 minutes. GridProfile polls public utility outage maps around the clock, and the median outage is in our database 19 minutes after it starts, a figure that includes the time the utility takes to post it.
For most uses that's faster than you need. A mail house pulls once a day, and a sales team works yesterday's outages this morning. What matters more than the minutes is that nobody has to go and fetch the data.
How does a power outage integration work?
Your system asks on a schedule, and the addresses arrive in the tool you already use. In practice that's one call a day per territory ("yesterday's outages in these counties"), answered with a list of addresses that goes straight into a mail queue, a CRM or a dispatch board.
You don't need to be a developer to set one up. We scope the endpoint to your stack (JSON or CSV, pull or a daily push to SFTP or a webhook, your field names), issue a key, and your developer or your platform's integration team wires it in once.
The reason to integrate at all is volume that won't sit still. Florida utilities reported 739 unplanned outages on August 16 and 2,557 on August 20. Texas ran from 1,252 on its quietest day of the month to 6,463 on its busiest.
Nobody staffs a spreadsheet hand-off for a job that quintuples without warning. With an integration, a quiet day makes a small drop, a storm day makes a big one, and nobody on your team opens a file.
How do I keep volume under control when a storm hits?
Put a limit on every call. The API never returns more records than the limit, so a typo in a query or a hurricane day stops at the cap.
Filters run on our side, before anything is delivered:
- Minimum outage duration, to skip the 20-minute blips.
- Minimum customers affected, to skip single-house faults.
- Minimum outages in the window, for repeat sufferers only.
- ZIP codes and a date window, counted back from today.
- ZIP-level Census figures: median home value, share of single-family homes, share of residents 65 and older, and share working from home. These describe the ZIP, so they steer a campaign toward better neighborhoods without qualifying individual homes.
A count-only call tells you how many records a query would produce without delivering any, so you can size a campaign before committing to it. Every record also carries a stable ID, and repeats inside a cooldown window (two months works well) count as already delivered.
Who uses a power outage API with addresses?
Mostly businesses that send something, or someone, to the house. Direct-mail houses are the clearest case: an outage is a trigger for their clients' campaigns, and an integration turns it into a standing daily job across a whole book of clients.
Addresses roll up, too. The same records group into streets and block ranges for a saturation drop, or into carrier routes after your CASS pass. Our street-level outage lists with house-number ranges are that rollup, already built.
Their clients, and anyone who sells direct, want the same data. Generator dealers sell on long outages (how dealers work outage lists), home battery installers want the streets with frequent short ones (the battery version), and solar installers pair either with a backup pitch.
Tree services and storm-restoration companies care about the cause. When the utility publishes one, the record carries it, but only about one outage in six comes with a cause, so treat it as a segment. We looked at why most utilities never explain their outages.
Which utilities and counties does the API cover?
In the 30 days to September 8, 2026, the API drew on 214 utilities in 2,307 counties across 47 states and DC. Coverage runs county by county, so ask about the counties you care about.
Send us a list and we'll tell you what's in each one: which utilities we watch there and how many outages it produced last month.
To scope an integration, email me with those counties. To see one county's outage data first, grab a free grid profile.