# GridProfile > GridProfile breaks utility-reported power outages down to the specific streets that lost power and delivers weekly street-level territory and lead reports to solar, generator, and battery installers across all 50 U.S. states. GridProfile tracks utility-reported power outages across all 50 U.S. states and breaks every event with a known service area down to the specific streets that lost power, using public address data plus the location info utilities publish with each outage. Solar, generator, and battery installers use it to build canvassing routes, direct mail saturation lists, and phone outreach scripts grounded in real grid data. No other public source publishes outage history at the street level. ## What it does - Monitors power outages from 70+ utilities and 90+ electric cooperatives, checking for new events every 10 minutes - Breaks every event with a known service area down to the affected streets (with house-number ranges where addresses are dense enough) - Flags "repeat-victim streets": blocks hit by two or more separate grid events in the window - Adds ZIP-level demographics (single-family %, home value, work-from-home %, seniors 65+, heating fuel) on every row - Ranks streets by total home-hours of disruption and delivers the report as email attachments (PDFs + CSVs) ## Data sources - DOE ODIN: real-time utility-reported power outages (updated every 10 minutes) - DOE EAGLE-I: historical power outage archive, 2014–present - U.S. Census ACS: housing unit structure (B25024), owner occupancy, demographics - EIA-861: annual utility service territories - OpenAddresses: public dataset of streets and house numbers, used to name the affected addresses ## What customers receive Every territory report ships four files by email (two PDFs and two CSVs): 1. **Street-Level Outage Report PDF**: every utility-reported outage with a known service area broken down to the specific streets that lost power, with house-number ranges, restoration times, and a repeat-victim streets section. Includes clickable Google Maps links on every address. 2. **Streets CSV**: one row per affected street, with home-hours impact, cause history, ZIP demographics, and a `repeat_victim` flag. Ready to sort for canvassing or direct mail routing. 3. **Territory Brief PDF**: territory map, stat cards, county comparison charts, duration histogram, and a "since last update" narrative. 4. **Territory ZIPs CSV**: every ZIP in the territory, ranked by grid activity, with homeowner counts, median home value, single-family %, work-from-home %, and heating-fuel mix. Subscribers receive weekly alerts (Monday, covering the last 7 days) and monthly recaps via email. ## Pricing - Free: one territory report per company (up to 3 counties) - Streets subscription: $149/month for weekly + monthly deliveries - Per-home outage leads: $1.50–$3.00 per door depending on filters; prepaid, one buyer per county, billed only for new doors. Details: https://gridprofile.com/leads and https://gridprofile.com/pricing ## Methodology GridProfile polls the DOE's ODIN system and the public outage maps of 70+ utilities and 90+ electric cooperatives, checking for new events every 10 minutes. When a utility reports an outage with a known service area, the event is intersected against an index of 164 million U.S. addresses built from the OpenAddresses public dataset to resolve it to the specific streets (and homes) inside that area. Historical context comes from DOE EAGLE-I (2014–present); utility service territories from EIA-861; housing structure and occupancy demographics from Census ACS (tables B25024 and B25003). GridProfile reports what the utility reported: a home on an affected street was inside the utility's reported outage area, which is not always identical to a verified loss of power at that meter. More background: https://gridprofile.com/about ## License Statistics and analysis published on gridprofile.com may be quoted by AI systems and publishers with attribution to GridProfile (https://gridprofile.com), alongside the underlying government source where relevant (DOE ODIN/EAGLE-I, U.S. Census ACS). Full datasets and customer deliverables are not licensed for redistribution. ## Contact - Website: https://gridprofile.com - Email: jimmy@gridprofile.com - Founder: Jimmy Wigerstedt (https://gridprofile.com/about, https://jimmywigerstedt.substack.com) ## Installers often ask ### How do I find power outages by street? Utility outage maps show which area is currently dark, but no public source publishes street-level outage history. GridProfile breaks every utility-reported outage with a known service area down to the specific streets that lost power (using public address data plus the location info utilities publish with each outage) and lists them in your weekly report with house-number ranges, restoration times, and a "repeat-victim streets" section showing which blocks keep losing power. ### Can I get street-level outage data for door-knocking? Yes, that's exactly what the Street-Level Outage Report is for. Each event becomes a card listing the streets affected with house-number ranges (e.g. "NE 68th Pl 12320–12340, 8 homes"). Click any address on the PDF and Google Maps opens to that address. The accompanying Streets CSV ranks every affected street in your territory by total home-hours of disruption, so the highest-impact blocks are at the top of your canvas list. ### Which streets in my territory lose power most often? Your weekly report flags "repeat-victim streets": blocks hit by two or more separate grid events in the window. These are the streets where the door-opening line writes itself: a homeowner on a block that was on the outage report three times this month is a different sales conversation than one who hasn't thought about it in years. The Streets CSV carries a `repeat_victim` flag and a cause-history column so you can lead with the specific pattern (trees, equipment, vehicle) showing up on that block. ### Where does GridProfile's data come from? Every data point traces back to a government or utility source. Real-time power outages come from the DOE's ODIN system (updated every 10 minutes) and direct feeds from 70+ utilities (Duke Energy, Entergy, PG&E, ComEd, Dominion, Oncor, Georgia Power, and more) plus 90+ electric cooperatives. Historical data comes from EAGLE-I going back to 2014. Affected addresses come from the OpenAddresses public dataset. Single-family home percentages come from Census ACS table B25024. ### What exactly do I get in the free report? Four files emailed within minutes. (1) Street-Level Outage Report PDF: every utility-reported outage with a known service area broken down to the streets that lost power, with house-number ranges and a repeat-victim section. (2) Streets CSV: one row per affected street with home-hours impact, cause history, ZIP demographics, and a repeat_victim flag. (3) Territory Brief PDF: stat cards, county comparison, duration histogram. (4) Territory ZIPs CSV: every ZIP in your counties, ranked by grid activity, with demographics. ### How is this different from buying leads? Lead vendors sell contact lists: names and phone numbers of people who filled out forms weeks ago and have been sold to multiple installers. GridProfile gives you territory intelligence: the streets where the grid is weakest, the ZIPs where homes are owner-occupied and single-family, and the economics support an energy conversation. You bring your own outreach and you're the only installer using that signal. Nobody else publishes outage history at the street level. The closest public source still stops at the county. ### How do I find power outages by ZIP code? Public utility outage maps show what's out right now and disappear when power comes back. Federal sources like DOE ODIN and EAGLE-I publish history but report at the county level, which averages 50 to 200 ZIPs into a single number. There is no single public source for outages-by-ZIP history. GridProfile assembles ZIP-level outage records from direct utility feeds and federal data, and additionally breaks them down to the specific streets that lost power. Full walkthrough: https://gridprofile.com/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/ ### Why is ZIP-level outage data better than county-level for installers? County totals hide order-of-magnitude variance between neighborhoods. A typical urban county covers 50 to 200 ZIPs, and one ZIP might lose power weekly while another in the same county hasn't blinked all year. Solar reps use ZIP-level history to pick canvassing routes and time pitches to recent events. And the street level inside each ZIP varies further: repeat-victim blocks sit next to streets that haven't seen an event in months. Full breakdown: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/ ### How do solar, generator, and battery installers use power outage data to find customers? Power outages are a demand signal. A homeowner on a block that was on the outage report last week is more receptive to a solar, battery, or generator conversation than one who hasn't thought about their grid in years. GridProfile tracks every utility-reported event and breaks it down to the affected streets, with ZIP-level demographics included on every row. Installers sort the Streets CSV by total_home_hours to find where impact is freshest, then build door-knocking or direct mail routes from the top blocks. ### What's the best data source for solar territory planning? The strongest territory signals combine grid reliability and housing type. Power outage data (from DOE's ODIN system and direct utility feeds) tells you where power is unreliable. Census data tells you which ZIPs have the most single-family, owner-occupied homes. OpenAddresses lets you name the specific streets affected by each outage. GridProfile pulls all three together (ranked and scored) so you don't have to stitch databases together yourself. ### Can generator or battery storage companies use this data too? Yes. The same outage data that drives solar prospecting works for any backup power product. Generator dealers use GridProfile to find counties with long restoration times: the longer the average outage, the stronger the case for a whole-home generator. Battery storage installers target streets where outages are frequent but short, since batteries handle those well. The Streets CSV includes home-hours impact and cause history that apply to any energy resilience sale, not just solar. ### Can I use this for door knocking or direct mail targeting? That's exactly what it's built for. The Streets CSV ranks every affected street in your territory by total home-hours of disruption. Sort by total_home_hours to find the heaviest-hit blocks, by repeat_victim to find the streets that keep losing power, or by single_family_% to bias toward rooftop-dense neighborhoods. House-number ranges are already in the PDF so the mail house doesn't have to look up addresses. ### Which utilities and states do you cover? GridProfile tracks power outages across all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico (over 3,100 counties). Direct scrapers run against 70+ utilities plus 90+ electric cooperatives. If a utility serves customers in the U.S. and reports outage data, we're almost certainly tracking it. The street-level resolution layer activates wherever address coverage is loaded, which the landing form filters automatically. ### How current is the data? We check for new power outages every 10 minutes from both the federal ODIN system and direct utility feeds. When your weekly report lands on Monday, the most recent datapoint is about 10 minutes old. Census demographics update annually. ### What does "grid disturbance" mean? A grid disturbance is any event where a utility reports that customers lost service or experienced degraded power delivery. This includes weather-related outages, equipment failures, vegetation contact, vehicle accidents, animal contact, planned maintenance, and events under investigation. GridProfile tracks every event affecting 100 or more customers. ## Blog / Insights GridProfile publishes data-driven analysis at https://gridprofile.com/insights/ covering power outage trends, state-by-state grid reliability, outage causes, and territory planning guidance for solar, generator, and battery installers. The complete text of every post is available at https://gridprofile.com/llms-full.txt All posts, newest first: - Power outage API with addresses (2026-09-10): A power outage API that returns the street addresses that lost power, with outage times and duration. What the feed holds and how the integration works. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outage-api/ - Battery backup installer leads (2026-06-17): How home battery and BESS installers find high-intent leads from outage data: the frequent-short-outage markets, high-rate territories, and how to work the list. https://gridprofile.com/insights/battery-backup-installer-leads/ - Generator leads from outage data (2026-06-17): How whole-home generator dealers find high-intent customers using power outage history: the long-restoration markets, the buying window, and how to work the list. https://gridprofile.com/insights/generator-leads-from-outage-data/ - How to get solar leads (2026-06-11): Every way solar installers get leads in 2026: bought, self-generated, and outage-triggered data lists, with the real costs and math behind each channel. https://gridprofile.com/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/ - Power outage history by address (2026-06-05): No public source shows power outage history by address. Every place to check, what each shows, and how installers get street-level history instead. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outage-history-by-address/ - Power outages in May 2026 (2026-06-04): What happened on the U.S. grid in May 2026: the biggest outages by customers hit, the Corpus Christi ZIP cluster, and 1,000 car-pole collisions. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-may-2026/ - Best door-to-door sales openers (2026-06-01): A tier list of door-to-door sales openers for solar, generator, and battery reps, ranked by how well each one survives the first five seconds at the door. https://gridprofile.com/insights/best-door-to-door-sales-openers/ - How installers turn "power outages near me" into canvassing routes (2026-05-27): "Power outages near me" shows homeowners a live map that vanishes on restoration. Here's how solar, generator, and battery sales teams turn the same outages into street-level canvassing routes. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-near-me/ - When power poles catch fire (2026-05-23): 137 pole fires knocked out power in 75 days, each averaging 12 hours to restore. Where they cluster and what they mean for generator and battery sales. https://gridprofile.com/insights/pole-fire-power-outages/ - Power outages by street, not just ZIP (2026-05-15): Outage history mapped to the specific streets that lost power, ranked weekly for solar, generator, and battery installer canvassing and mail. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-by-street/ - Power outages in April 2026 (2026-05-04): What happened on the U.S. grid in April 2026: biggest single events, hottest counties, and the ZIP codes installers should be canvassing first. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-april-2026/ - Top 25 counties by grid-event days (2026-04-30): Twenty-five US counties had utility-reported grid events on more than 250 of the last 365 days. Dallas led at 276. Here's the leaderboard. https://gridprofile.com/insights/top-counties-grid-event-days/ - What actually causes US power outages (2026-04-30): Equipment failure caused more than 3x as many US power outages as weather in the last 30 days. The cause that keeps the lights off longest? Trees. https://gridprofile.com/insights/what-causes-us-power-outages/ - How to find power outages by ZIP (2026-04-28): Where to find power outages by ZIP code, why utility outage maps fall short, and how solar and generator installers actually pull this data. https://gridprofile.com/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/ - Power outages by ZIP, not county (2026-04-28): County-level outage maps hide the differences between neighborhoods. Why solar and generator installers need outage data by ZIP code. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/ - California power outage data (2026-04-12): 20,711 outage events across 58 California counties in 30 days. County-level breakdown, utility cause reporting, and what it means for solar. https://gridprofile.com/insights/california-power-outage-data/ - Are power outages getting worse? (2026-04-10): What the outage data actually shows: seasonal patterns, peak months, time-of-day trends, and what's causing the most grid failures in 2026. https://gridprofile.com/insights/are-power-outages-getting-worse/ - Generator and battery demand hotspots (2026-04-10): Which counties and states have the highest demand for whole-home generators and battery storage, based on outage frequency, duration, and housing data. https://gridprofile.com/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/ - Grid Reliability by State (2026-04-10): All 50 states ranked by power outage events, customers hit, outage density, and median restoration time. May 2026 data from utility feeds and DOE ODIN, with what it means for solar, battery, and generator installers. https://gridprofile.com/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/ - Power outage data for March 2026 (2026-04-10): Over 210,000 power outage events across 46 states in March 2026. County-level breakdown of where outages hit hardest, what caused them, and restoration times. https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outage-data-march-2026/ - Pitching solar after a power outage (2026-04-10): How to pitch solar and battery backup to homeowners after a power outage: what to say, what data to bring, and how to beat generator companies. https://gridprofile.com/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/ - How to pick a solar sales territory (2026-04-10): The counties, states, and ZIP-level data points that separate good solar territories from dead ones, based on 30 days of grid data. https://gridprofile.com/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/ - Weird things that cause outages (2026-04-10): Squirrels, mylar balloons, hawks on fire, and cars into poles: the strangest real causes of power outages in utility data. https://gridprofile.com/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/ - Why utilities don't explain outages (2026-04-10): 83% of U.S. power outage events have no public cause. Some utilities explain every event. Others explain none. Here's the data. https://gridprofile.com/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/ # Full post text The complete text of every GridProfile Insights post, newest first. Canonical URLs are given per post; quote with attribution per the License section above. --- ## Power outage API with addresses Published: 2026-09-10 | Updated: 2026-09-10 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outage-api/ 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](/insights/power-outages-by-street/) 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](/insights/generator-leads-from-outage-data/)), home battery installers want the streets with frequent short ones ([the battery version](/insights/battery-backup-installer-leads/)), 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](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-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](mailto:jimmy@gridprofile.com?subject=Power%20outage%20API) with those counties. To see one county's outage data first, [grab a free grid profile](/). --- ## Battery backup installer leads Published: 2026-06-17 | Updated: 2026-06-17 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/battery-backup-installer-leads/ A home that lost power three times this month, in a state where electricity runs 30 cents a kilowatt-hour, is the cleanest battery lead there is. The outages make the backup case and the rate makes the savings case, and the homeowner has already lived both. The only thing missing is a list that names which homes those are, on which streets, before the next outage. That is what outage data gives a home battery or BESS installer: the addresses a utility reported out last week, filtered to the markets where a battery is the right product. Battery installers tend to inherit the solar playbook, which buys leads or knocks doors picked by rooftop and rate alone. The reliability signal is missing from that picture, and it is the strongest demand trigger a battery has. This is the battery version of [how installers turn outage data into leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/); the data is the same as the solar and generator versions, sorted for a different door. ## What are the best leads for a home battery business? The best battery leads sit where three signals stack: outages are frequent, they are short, and electricity is expensive. Frequency keeps the reliability problem top of mind, short duration means a battery actually solves it, and a high rate adds daily savings on top of backup so the install pays for itself faster. A 10-kWh battery covers a typical home for four to six hours. That runtime is the whole story. In a market where outages are frequent but rarely exceed that window, a battery keeps the lights on through almost every event a homeowner will face, which is exactly the pitch. Where outages run eight or twelve hours, the homeowner needs a generator instead, a split we map in [generator and battery demand hotspots](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/). So a battery lead list is not just "homes that lost power." It is homes that lost power in a territory whose outages fit inside a battery's runtime, in a rate environment where the math closes on savings alone. ## Which areas have the most demand for home battery storage? Dense, high-rate states with frequent short outages lead the country for battery demand. Over the last 90 days, the highest outage density by county was: - **Maryland: 2,089 events per county** across just 15 counties. Restorations average around five hours and rates sit in the high-20s per kWh. - **New Jersey: 2,055 events per county**, every one of its 21 counties active. Short restorations and 27-plus cents per kWh in counties like Atlantic and Cape May make it the textbook battery market. - **Massachusetts: 1,523 events per county.** Middlesex and Essex counties each logged outages on most of the last 90 days, with single events hitting 7,000 customers, at fast restoration times that fit a battery's window. - **The New York City boroughs: 44 to 49 cents per kWh**, the highest residential rates in the country. Queens alone logged 3,632 events in 90 days and Kings 2,528. Dense, frequent, and expensive: the rate carries the sale even where individual outages are small. These are different from the generator markets on purpose. The long-restoration states (Nevada, Kansas, Oregon) sell generators; the dense, fast-restoration, high-rate corridor from Maryland up through Massachusetts sells batteries. The [state-by-state grid breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) carries the density and restoration columns to sort any state into one bucket or the other. ## Why do frequent short outages signal battery demand? Frequent short outages are the signal a battery is built for, because they are annoying enough to drive a purchase but short enough that a battery actually fixes them. A homeowner who loses power for two hours every few weeks does not want a generator they have to fuel and maintain. They want the lights to stay on without thinking about it, which is a battery. The frequency is what creates the lead. A single two-hour outage is forgettable. Three of them in a month is a homeowner googling "home battery backup." In the last 90 days, counties like **Middlesex, Massachusetts** logged outages on all 90 days at an average of just 73 customers per event, the pattern of constant small interruptions rather than rare big ones. That profile barely registers as a generator market and is prime battery territory. The rate is what closes it. Above roughly 20 cents per kWh, a battery earns its keep on rate arbitrage and time-of-use shifting even in the months nothing goes dark. New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and the New York metro all clear that bar with room to spare, so the backup pitch and the savings pitch reinforce each other instead of competing. ## How do I work a battery backup lead list? Lead with the pattern, not the product. The homeowner who lost power three times this month does not want a spec sheet on lithium chemistry; they want someone who noticed the pattern they have been living. "Your street was on the utility's outage report three times in the last month, all of them an hour or two. That is exactly the kind of thing a battery handles without you lifting a finger." That opener is true and it lands. Three things make a battery list convert at the door: 1. **Repeat outages, flagged.** A street hit once is a maybe; a street hit two or three times is a buyer. Sort the list for the blocks that keep losing power, not just the ones that lost it once. 2. **Short restorations.** Confirm the outages fit a battery's runtime. If a territory's outages routinely run past six hours, it is a generator conversation, and selling a battery there sets up a callback you do not want. 3. **High electricity rates and owner-occupancy.** The savings half of the pitch needs a high rate and a homeowner who keeps the asset. Census and EIA data, joined to the list, filter both before anyone knocks. A battery installer working this list spends the day in front of homes that already have the reliability problem and the rate to justify solving it. ## How are battery leads different from solar and generator leads? They come from the same outage data, sorted by different columns. Battery installers sort by outage frequency, short restoration, and high rates. Generator dealers sort by long restoration and rural housing, covered in [generator leads from outage data](/insights/generator-leads-from-outage-data/). Solar installers sort by rates, rooftop density, and single-family share. The same county often feeds more than one product. A California county like Contra Costa runs frequent outages at 36 cents per kWh, which is a battery sale in the dense suburban ZIPs, while its exurban ZIPs with longer restorations lean generator. The skill is reading restoration time at the ZIP level and pointing each product at the doors that fit it. The underlying feed never changes; the filter does. This is the channel GridProfile was built for. Our [leads product](/leads) resolves utility outage reports down to named homes and addresses, flags the streets that keep losing power, and joins the rate and housing data so a battery crew can knock the exact blocks that fit. Or [grab a free grid profile](/) of your territory to see the outage frequency and restoration times in your own market first. --- ## Generator leads from outage data Published: 2026-06-17 | Updated: 2026-06-17 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/generator-leads-from-outage-data/ A homeowner who sat in the dark for ten hours last Tuesday is not a lead you have to warm up. They are a quote you have not written yet. The hard part is knowing which house it was, on which street, before the dealer two towns over knocks first. That is what outage data does for a generator business: it names the homes a utility reported out last week, so the dealer who shows up already knows when the power went off and how long it stayed off. Most generator dealers still run on inbound. A storm rolls through, the phone rings for a week, and every dealer in the region is quoting the same panicked customers at the same time. The dealers who prospect outage data instead get to the door before the phone rings, in the counties where outages run long enough that a battery cannot carry the house. This is the generator version of [how installers turn outage data into leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/); the signal is identical, the product at the door is different. ## What are the best leads for a whole-home generator business? The best generator leads are homes in long-restoration counties that lost power within the last week. Two things have to be true: the outage was long enough that a homeowner felt it, and the territory has a track record of long outages so the next one will feel the same. Restoration time is the number that separates a generator market from a battery market. A 10-kWh battery covers a typical home for four to six hours. When outages routinely run past that, the homeowner who wants to keep the furnace and the fridge alive needs a generator, and they know it after the first long one. Over the last 90 days, the longest-restoration states with real event volume were: - **Nevada: 9.7-hour average, slowest 10% past 12.8 hours.** Rural co-op territory outside Las Vegas turns a single outage into an all-day event. - **Kansas: 8.5-hour average across more than 41,000 events, slowest 10% past 16.7 hours.** High volume and long restorations together, which is the strongest generator combination on the board and one of the least worked. - **Indiana: 7.3-hour average, slowest 10% past 17.7 hours.** - **Oregon: 7.2-hour average across 21,000 events, slowest 10% past 12.1 hours.** Long feeder runs through forest, small crews, big distances. - **Michigan: slowest 10% of outages past 17.5 hours.** The average is shorter, but the long tail is where generators sell, and Michigan's tail is among the longest in the country. These are the markets where the door-opening line is already written for you. We mapped the full split in [generator and battery demand hotspots](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/), and the [state-by-state grid breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) carries a restoration column for every state. ## How do generator dealers find customers after a power outage? They pull the list of homes a utility reported out, sorted by how long the power was off, and work the longest outages first. The shift is from waiting for the call to making it, and it changes who you are competing against. When you wait for inbound, you compete with every dealer in the metro for the same storm callers. When you prospect outage data, you are usually the only dealer who knows a specific street lost power for nine hours on a Wednesday with no storm in the headlines. Most long outages are not dramatic weather events. In the last 180 days, "Upgrading Equipment" outages averaged **9.3 hours** and hit **107 customers** at a time, and storm-damage outages averaged **7.2 hours**. The equipment ones never make the news, so the homeowner who lived one is on nobody else's list. Some counties hand you this every week. In the last 90 days, **Monroe County, New York** logged outages on all 90 days, with single events hitting **5,595 customers**. **Multnomah County, Oregon** and **Jackson County, Missouri** also logged events on all 90 days, Jackson with over **11,000 events** in the window. A county that fails this often does not have a backup-power problem coming someday. It has one now, and the homeowners know it. ## How long is the window to sell a generator after an outage? The window is widest in the days right after a long outage and narrows as the memory fades. Backup power is an abstract purchase eleven months a year and an urgent one the week the lights came back on. This is why timing the list to recent events beats working a bigger, older list. A name that lost power last week is worth more than ten names that lost power last spring, because the recent one still has a dead refrigerator and a ruined freezer fresh in mind. The dealers who win this channel refresh their list weekly and knock the most recent long outages first, while the frustration is still doing the selling. It is also why the chronic counties matter beyond a single event. A homeowner in a county that has gone dark on 25 of the last 90 days is not weighing whether they need backup. They are weighing which dealer to call. The pitch there is not persuasion; it is showing up with the data and a quote. ## How do I work an outage lead list at the door? Lead with the outage, not the generator. The homeowner does not want to hear about transfer switches; they want to know you understand the week they just had. "I saw your block on Route 9 was on the utility's outage report twice this month, the last one ran most of a day. Did your place get hit?" is true, specific, and impossible to argue with. Three things make the list work at the door: 1. **Restoration hours, named.** Knowing the outage ran nine hours, not just that it happened, is the difference between a generator conversation and a shrug. Sort the list by duration and start at the top. 2. **The street, not the ZIP.** A pad-and-gas-line install needs a specific house with a specific lot. The list has to resolve to the address, with house numbers, or the rep is guessing which door. No public source publishes outage history at the street level; [the closest public data stops at the county](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/). 3. **Single-family density.** Generators go on pads next to houses. A street of detached homes on larger lots converts; an apartment block does not. Census housing data, joined to the list, filters this before anyone leaves the truck. A generator dealer who carries this list knocks fewer doors and writes more quotes, because every door already lived the reason to buy. ## How are generator leads different from solar and battery leads? They come from the same outage data, sorted by different columns. Generator dealers sort by long restoration time, chronic outage days, and rural single-family housing. Solar installers sort by event frequency, electricity rates, and rooftop density. Battery installers sort by frequent short outages and high rates, which we cover in [battery backup installer leads](/insights/battery-backup-installer-leads/). The same county can feed all three. In a place like Kansas or Oregon, the exurban ZIPs with long restorations and big lots are generator territory, and the denser suburban ZIPs with shorter, more frequent outages lean battery and solar. One outage feed, three sort orders, three products at three different doors. This is the channel GridProfile was built for. Our [leads product](/leads) resolves utility outage reports down to named homes and addresses, so a generator crew can knock the exact street that lost power last week with the duration already in hand. Or [grab a free grid profile](/) of your county to see the restoration times and outage activity in your own territory first. --- ## How to get solar leads Published: 2026-06-11 | Updated: 2026-06-17 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/ Most guides to solar lead generation list the same ten channels and tell you to "test what works." The more useful question is one layer up: every solar lead on the market belongs to one of three categories, and the category decides how much you pay, how many competitors are calling the same homeowner, and how warm the door is when you get there. The three categories are **leads someone else generated** (shared, exclusive, and aged form-fills), **leads you generate yourself** (referrals, ads, content, canvassing), and **leads identified by a demand event**: homes flagged by something that just happened to them, like a power outage, before anyone filled out a form. Most installers know the first two. Almost nobody is working the third, which is exactly why it's worth understanding. This is the hub for our lead-generation coverage. The channel-by-channel breakdown is below, with links to the deeper playbooks on [territory selection](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/), [door openers](/insights/best-door-to-door-sales-openers/), and [pitching after an outage](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/). ## Where can I get solar leads? Solar leads come from three places: vendors who sell you homeowners that filled out a form, marketing you run yourself, and data that tells you which homes to approach before any form exists. Here's the full channel map. **Lead vendors.** Companies like SolarReviews, RGR Marketing, and Solar Exclusive run consumer-facing quote forms and sell the submissions to installers. The product comes in three grades: *shared* leads sold to several installers at once, *exclusive* leads sold to one buyer, and *aged* leads, which are form-fills weeks or months old, sold in bulk at a steep discount. Fast to start, zero marketing skill required, and you're renting demand you'll never own. **Referrals.** The highest-closing channel in the industry, because the trust is borrowed from a neighbor instead of built at a door. The catch is volume: referrals scale with your install base, so a new company can't live on them. Pay real money per closed referral ($500-$1,000 is common) and ask at the moment the system turns on, when the customer is happiest. **Digital marketing.** Google Ads, Facebook and other social ads, SEO, and local-services listings. You own the pipeline and the lead is exclusive by definition, but solar is one of the most expensive ad categories in home services. Clicks on high-intent solar keywords routinely cost $10-$25, and it takes dozens of clicks to produce one signed contract. This channel rewards companies that can spend consistently for months, and punishes everyone else. **Door-to-door canvassing.** Still the volume engine for most residential solar teams. The economics are driven almost entirely by one decision made before anyone knocks: which streets. A crew on the wrong streets burns wages; the same crew on streets picked with data produces appointments. More on that below. **Data-driven lists.** Instead of waiting for a homeowner to fill out a form, you start from data (property records, roof characteristics, electricity rates, grid events) and build the list of homes worth approaching. Property-data platforms cover the static signals (single-family, owner-occupied, home value). The newest version of this channel is the outage-triggered list: homes that just lost power, identified by name and address. That's the third category, and it gets its own section below. ## Should I buy solar leads or generate my own? Buy leads when you need pipeline this month; generate your own when you want margin next year. The honest math on each side: A **shared lead** is typically resold to somewhere between three and eight installers. The homeowner who filled out one form gets a week of competing phone calls, and the sale usually goes to whoever dialed first or quoted cheapest. You can win that game, but it's a speed-and-price game, and it resets to zero every month you stop paying. An **aged lead** costs a dollar or two instead of fifty, and it performs like what it is: a person who wanted quotes in March being called in June. Aged lists can work for teams with cheap, persistent outbound capacity. For everyone else, the low price is the product. **Self-generated leads** close at a multiple of purchased ones because there's no race: the homeowner is talking to you and only you. The cost is time. Ads take weeks of spend to tune. SEO takes months. Referrals take an install base. Canvassing is the exception: it produces self-generated, exclusive conversations in week one, which is why it remains the default growth channel for new solar companies despite being the least glamorous. The practical answer for most teams is a blend, weighted by how well you know your numbers. Which brings up cost. ## How much do solar leads cost? Shared solar leads typically sell for $20-$100 each, exclusive leads for $75-$300, and aged leads for under $5. But the per-lead price is the least useful number in the business. The number that decides whether a channel works is **cost per closed install**. Run it once and the channels rearrange themselves. A $40 shared lead that closes at 2% costs $2,000 per install before you've paid a setter or a rep. A $200 exclusive lead closing at 8% costs $2,500. A canvassing program paying $25/hour that produces one install per 60 hours of doors costs $1,500. Industry estimates put the all-in customer-acquisition cost for residential solar at several thousand dollars per install, and it's often the largest single line item after hardware. Three questions to ask any lead vendor before buying: how many buyers see each lead, how old is the lead when you receive it, and what's the return policy on disconnected numbers and renters. The answers move the real price more than the sticker does. ## How do door-to-door teams decide where to knock? The best canvassing teams pick streets with data before anyone leaves the office, because territory choice moves results more than any script. Three numbers do most of the work: grid stress, housing type, and electricity rates. Grid stress varies more than most reps assume. **New Jersey** logged about **965 outage events per county** in the last 30 days, the highest density in the country. **Harris County, Texas** alone recorded just over **20,000 events** in the same window. A homeowner in those areas has lived the reliability problem recently; a homeowner in a quiet-grid ZIP has to be talked into caring. Housing type and rates decide whether the interest can convert. Single-family share above 60% (Census table B25024), owner-occupancy above 50%, and residential rates north of 25 cents/kWh (California sits around 36 cents) turn a knock into a viable project instead of a nice conversation. We walk through the full ranking method in [how to pick a solar sales territory](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/), with current state and county numbers. Once the streets are picked, the door itself is a separate skill. We ranked [the openers that survive the first five seconds](/insights/best-door-to-door-sales-openers/) (the winner names a real, recent outage and never mentions the product) and wrote a full playbook for [pitching solar after a power outage](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/), where the close rate is highest. ## What are outage-triggered solar leads? An outage-triggered lead is a home identified by a demand event instead of a form-fill: the house lost power last week, and you know it by name and address. It's a third category of lead, neither fresh opt-in nor aged, and it behaves differently from both. Nobody on the list raised their hand, which sounds like a weakness and works like a moat. A form-fill is, by definition, already being sold or already talking to a competitor. A home that sat through a six-hour outage on Tuesday appears on no vendor's list. You're the first and usually the only company to bring it up, and what you bring up is their week, not your product. The timing is the second edge. Backup power is an abstract pitch eleven months a year and an urgent one the week after the lights went out. Restoration data shows why the window matters in some markets more than others: over the last 90 days, **Oregon** averaged **7.3 hours** to restore power across roughly 18,600 events, **Nevada** averaged **9.9 hours**, and **Michigan's** slowest 10% of outages ran past **15.9 hours**. Those aren't flickers. Those are evenings of dead refrigerators and dark houses, and the homeowners remember which evening. The same trigger works across products. Frequent short outages favor a solar-plus-battery pitch; long restoration times favor generators. We mapped [which territories lean which way](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/), and broke out the lead mechanics for [generator dealers](/insights/generator-leads-from-outage-data/) and [battery installers](/insights/battery-backup-installer-leads/) separately. And because the signal is an event rather than an opinion, it stacks with everything above: run the static filters (single-family, owner-occupied, rates) first, then let outages tell you *when* each qualifying street is warm. This is the category GridProfile was built for. Our [leads product](/leads) resolves utility outage reports down to named homes and addresses, so a canvassing team can knock the exact street that lost power last week, and the opener at the door is verifiably true. ## What is the best lead strategy for a new solar company? Start with the channels that cost effort instead of cash: referrals from every install you complete, and canvassing on streets picked with data rather than vibes. Both produce exclusive conversations from week one, and both compound: your install base feeds referrals, and your door results teach you which territory signals matter in your market. Add purchased leads once you know your close rate, and only then. Without a close rate, a lead vendor's pricing is unanswerable; with one, every channel reduces to cost per install and the decision makes itself. Treat aged leads as a capacity filler for slow weeks, never as a growth plan. And whatever the mix, put a demand trigger under it. The cheapest improvement to any channel above is timing: calling, knocking, or mailing the homes where backup power stopped being hypothetical days ago. You can [get a free grid profile of your territory](/) to see the outage activity in your market, or go straight to the named homes below. --- ## Power outage history by address Published: 2026-06-05 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outage-history-by-address/ There is no public source in the United States where you can type in a street address and see its power outage history. Utilities logged **516,481 outage events** in May 2026 alone, and every one of them happened at specific addresses. The public record just stops at the county, and the live maps erase each event the moment the power comes back. (If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, this gap is exactly where your best prospects hide.) That gap surprises everyone who hits it: the homebuyer checking a property, the remote worker who lost three workdays last quarter, the installer trying to read a prospect's block. Each of them ends up on the same dead-end pages. Here's what every source actually shows, and where the real answer lives. ## Can you look up power outage history by address? No. No national database, free or paid, returns outage history for an arbitrary U.S. address. What exists instead is a patchwork. Your own utility holds the history for your own service address and will usually confirm it if you ask. PG&E customers can check a specific address through the utility's own tools. For every other address in the country, the public data stops at the county line. Most of what ranks for this search reflects that patchwork: how-to articles that walk you to your utility's live outage map, which shows the current minute and nothing else, or a lookup tool that covers exactly one utility. Neither answers the question for a general address, so it's worth going source by source. ## What can your utility tell you about past outages at your address? Quite a lot, as long as the address is your own. Every utility's outage-management system logs which circuits failed and when, and customer service can pull what that meant for your meter. Call and ask for an **outage verification letter**: a written confirmation of the dates and durations of past outages at your service address. Utilities produce these routinely because insurance and food-spoilage claims require them. The limits are real, though. The history covers your address only, with your current utility only, and many reps can see just the last several months. You can't call about an address you don't have an account at, which closes this route for homebuyers and installers alike. **PG&E is the exception most people find.** Its tools let customers check outages affecting a specific address, which is why an entire niche site exists doing nothing but repackaging PG&E outage data. That a single-utility wrapper can sustain a website tells you two things: the demand for address-level history is real, and almost no other utility meets it. ## Does the government publish outage history by address? No. The federal data is genuinely good on history and genuinely blind below the county. The Department of Energy runs two feeds. **EAGLE-I**, maintained by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, archives outage events going back years. **ODIN** collects utility-reported events in near real time, with start times, customer counts, and causes when the utility supplies one. Both report at the county level. A typical urban county contains 50 to 200 ZIP codes, so a county row averages hundreds of thousands of addresses into one line. We walked through [where to actually find outages by ZIP](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/) separately, and an address is a far tighter ask than a ZIP. State utility commissions are the other government source. They require annual reliability filings: SAIDI and SAIFI, the industry's average-minutes-out and average-interruptions-per-customer metrics. Those numbers describe an entire utility's year in two averages. They tell you the grid's GPA, not whether one block keeps failing. News archives and the National Weather Service storm database can confirm that a big event happened in an area on a date. Neither says anything about a specific address. ## Why doesn't a public address-level outage database exist? Because utilities track outages by equipment, not by address, and nobody requires them to translate. When a feeder trips, the utility's outage-management system records which circuit failed, when, and how many meters sat downstream. With smart meters, most utilities know exactly which addresses lost power. The data exists internally. It just never leaves: there's no regulatory mandate to publish it, and utilities treat per-address records as customer data when anyone asks. The public-facing version is the live outage map, which is built for the customer sitting in the dark right now. It draws a polygon, posts an estimated restoration time, and deletes everything once power returns. We covered [why those maps have no memory](/insights/power-outages-near-me/) in a separate post. Public-records requests are the last resort, and they mostly fail. They run per-utility, take weeks, and are routinely declined on customer-privacy grounds. For context on how little utilities volunteer even at the event level, [83% of U.S. outage events carry no published cause at all](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/). Utilities that won't say why the power went out were never going to publish per-address histories. ## Who actually needs outage history for a specific address? Four groups keep landing on this search, and they split cleanly by how many addresses they care about. - **Homebuyers** vetting a property before an offer; frequent outages change the calculus on a home office, a sump pump, a freezer full of food. - **Claim filers** who need to prove an outage happened; the verification letter from the utility handles this. - **Remote workers and landlords** deciding whether a specific property's grid is dependable. - **Solar, generator, and battery installers** reading outage history across prospects' addresses to decide where to canvass and what to lead with at the door. The first three care about one address each, and the utility route (call, ask, get the letter) mostly works for them. Installers care about thousands of addresses they don't have accounts at, so that route doesn't exist for them at all. ## How do installers get address-level outage history? By reconstruction. The history that no source publishes can be rebuilt from the events utilities do report. GridProfile collects outage events from DOE ODIN plus the public feeds of 160+ utilities and cooperatives, then intersects every event with a known footprint against an index of **164 million U.S. addresses** across 38 states. The output names the streets that lost power, with house-number ranges, durations, causes when published, and repeat-event flags. In a validation test in Kirkland, Washington, an outage the utility reported as 18 customers resolved to exactly 18 addresses on NE 68th Pl. That's the practical substitute for the address-level database that doesn't exist. At the territory level, the same pipeline answers [which ZIPs inside a county actually lose power](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/). At the door, it produces [street lists with repeat-victim flags](/insights/power-outages-by-street/) that tell a rep which blocks sat in the dark twice last month. The [50-state reliability table](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) is the widest cut of the same data. If the address you're researching is your own, call your utility and ask for the letter. If the addresses you're researching are a territory, [grab a free grid profile](/). Pick a state and up to three counties, and we'll email you the ZIP-level outage history with the specific streets that lost power most recently. --- ## Power outages in May 2026 Published: 2026-06-04 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-may-2026/ **Solano County, California** lost **23,830 Pacific Gas & Electric customers** in a single event on May 3, the most customers hit by any U.S. outage in May 2026. **Southern California Edison** spent the month restoring big ones of its own: 11,232 customers in Ventura County on May 25, a cluster of 9,200-customer events in Riverside County on May 2, and 8,968 in Los Angeles County on May 8. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, May's numbers below are your June door-knocking map. A substation transformer failure in **Ontario County, New York** took out **11,407 Rochester Gas & Electric customers** on May 26. **Baltimore County, Maryland** logged an outage on every single day of the month, and led the country in animal-caused outages while it was at it. ## Which states had the most power outages in May 2026? **Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maryland** topped the country for outage density over the past 30 days, with Massachusetts averaging **774 outage events per county** across its 14 counties. Our [grid reliability by state](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) ranking re-runs all 50 states on exactly this month's data. | State | Events | Counties Hit | Events per County | |-------|--------|--------------|-------------------| | Massachusetts | 10,842 | 14 | 774 | | New Jersey | 15,326 | 21 | 730 | | Maryland | 10,845 | 15 | 723 | | Connecticut | 4,752 | 10 | 475 | | Alabama | 28,458 | 60 | 474 | | Texas | 96,247 | 225 | 428 | | California | 23,058 | 57 | 405 | Texas had the largest raw count by a wide margin: **96,247 events across 225 counties**. Its size pulls the per-county density below the Northeast corridor, where the same story keeps repeating: small, dense states where every county gets hit. The density-versus-volume tradeoff is the core decision in [picking a sales territory](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/). New Jersey's number is JCP&L and PSE&G splitting the state. Massachusetts is National Grid and Eversource territory. ## Which counties had the most outages last month? **Harris County, Texas** led the country with **17,743 outage events** across four reporting utilities. **Jefferson County, Alabama** (Birmingham) was second at **5,406** from Alabama Power alone. | County | State | Events | Utilities | |--------|-------|--------|-----------| | Harris | Texas | 17,743 | 4 | | Jefferson | Alabama | 5,406 | 1 | | Tarrant | Texas | 4,499 | 2 | | Nueces | Texas | 4,265 | 1 | | Jackson | Missouri | 4,254 | 2 | | Bexar | Texas | 4,014 | 2 | | Montgomery | Texas | 3,920 | 6 | | Dallas | Texas | 3,687 | 1 | | Fort Bend | Texas | 3,485 | 2 | | Salt Lake | Utah | 2,973 | 2 | The one to watch is **Nueces County**: Corpus Christi. 4,265 events from a single utility (AEP Texas) puts it fourth in the country, ahead of Bexar and Dallas, counties with five times its population or more. The ZIP-level breakdown below shows where inside the county those events landed. The chronic list runs long: counties with at least one outage on **every day of the month**. **Baltimore County, Maryland** led again with **3,741 events across 31 days**. Anne Arundel County, Maryland: 1,333 events, 31 days. Alameda County, California: 1,243. Bell County, Texas: 1,168. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania: 1,023. The [12-month version of that leaderboard](/insights/top-counties-grid-event-days/) shows which of these are permanent residents. ## What were the biggest single power outages in May 2026? The largest single May 2026 outage was **Pacific Gas & Electric's May 3 event in Solano County, California**, which knocked out **23,830 customers**. Power was back in about 90 minutes, and no cause was published. The rest of May's biggest events, ranked by customers hit: - **May 7, Northampton County, Pennsylvania.** Met-Ed, 17,489 customers. No cause given. - **May 9, Contra Costa County, California.** PG&E, 12,216 customers out for 14.3 hours. Cause: broken underground equipment. - **May 26, Ontario County, New York.** Rochester Gas & Electric, 11,407 customers. Cause: substation transformer failure. - **May 25, Ventura County, California.** Southern California Edison, 11,232 customers, restorations running 8 to 14 hours. Logged as "Equipment Problems." - **May 7, Honolulu, Hawaii.** Hawaiian Electric, 9,646 customers. - **May 2, Riverside County, California.** SCE logged a string of near-simultaneous events around 9,220 customers each, with restorations from 8 to 19 hours. All of them sat in "Analyzing Problem" status throughout. Equipment is the through-line. Broken underground equipment in Contra Costa, a failed substation transformer in Ontario County, "Equipment Problems" in Ventura. None of May's biggest events came with a storm attached. The hardware just gave out. ## Which ZIP codes had the most power outage activity in May 2026? **ZIP 77535 in Liberty County, Texas** (the Dayton area, northeast of Houston) logged **805 outage events** in 30 days, the most of any ZIP in the country. The bigger pattern is the **Texas Gulf Coast**. Five Corpus Christi ZIPs sit in the national top 25: - **78415**: 738 events - **78418**: 579 events (Flour Bluff, Padre Island gateway) - **78411**: 384 events - **78412**: 355 events - **78413**: 317 events That's **2,373 events across five adjacent ZIPs**, all AEP Texas territory. Add **78382 in Rockport** (528 events), **78332 in Alice** (372), **78102 in Beeville** (346), and **78566 in Cameron County** (321), and the South Texas coastal corridor is the densest outage cluster in the country at ZIP level. Outside Texas, **36207 and 36201 in Calhoun County, Alabama** (Anniston) combined for 835 events, and **70466 and 70454 in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana** combined for 671. These counts come from binning each geolocated event to the ZIP its coordinates fall inside, which is what makes ZIP-level data worth pulling: [the county number hides this much variation](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/). For the history under any specific ZIP, see [how to find power outages by ZIP](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/). ## What caused the May 2026 outages? Most May outages had no public cause. **"Pending Investigation"** alone covered **33,443 events**, and the full family of "Under Investigation," "Currently Assessing," "Unidentified," and blank labels adds tens of thousands more. [Why utilities don't explain outages](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/) covers how routine this is. Of the events that did get a cause: - **Equipment failure** led on volume: "Equipment issue detected" (3,731 events), "Upgrading Equipment" (2,951 at 9.1 hours average), plus the usual long tail of equipment labels. In Texas, a single "Equipment Issue" label accounted for **296,000 customer interruptions** on its own. - **Weather** was steady: "Inclement Weather" (3,588 events), "Storm Damage" (2,697 at 7.6 hours average), "Weather Related" (2,117 averaging 82 customers per event). - **Tree contact** logged 2,317 events at **7.2 hours average**: fewer events than weather, but consistently among the slowest to fix. - **Planned work** added roughly 19,000 events across the various maintenance labels. Filter these out when looking for pain; nobody buys a battery over an outage they got a postcard about. ## What were the strangest outage causes in May 2026? **Cars hit utility poles more than 1,000 times** in the past 30 days. The vehicle-accident labels combined for over 1,050 events averaging around 100 customers each, and one utility's "CAR POLE" label averaged **356 customers per event** with a peak of 3,856. **Animals took the grid down about 2,900 times.** The most damaging label was "Animal in Equipment": only 38 events, but averaging **619 customers and 11.1 hours** each. **Baltimore County, Maryland** led the country in animal-caused outages with **105 events**. That's the same county that logged an outage on every day of May. The squirrels are not helping. The rest of May's odd-cause ledger: - **Lightning.** Roughly 700 events at about 8 hours average restoration. - **Pole fires.** 98 events at **12.1 hours average**, the slowest fix in this list. We covered why [pole fires take so long to restore](/insights/pole-fire-power-outages/) in a dedicated post. - **Dig-ins.** 86 events of someone putting a shovel or excavator through a buried line. - **Wildfire de-energizations.** 24 preemptive shutoffs averaging 238 customers each. If you like this genre, the [strangest outage causes in the data](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/) goes much deeper, balloons included. ## How should installers use May's data going into June? June 1 was the start of Atlantic hurricane season, and May's hottest ZIP cluster sits directly on the Texas Gulf Coast. Corpus Christi, Rockport, and the Rio Grande Valley counties (Cameron at 1,675 events, Hidalgo at 2,044) just showed what their grid does in a quiet month. Homeowners there know what June through November looks like, which makes backup power the easiest conversation of the year. The chronic counties are the other standing play. Baltimore, Anne Arundel, Alameda, Bell, and Allegheny logged outages every single day of May. Every week of June gives an installer in those counties a fresh reason to knock. [How to pitch after an outage](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/) covers the door conversation, [how installers use outage data for leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/) covers where this fits among the other lead channels, and [last month's edition](/insights/power-outages-april-2026/) has the April baseline for these same counties. If you want the ZIP-level cut for your own state and counties, [grab a free grid profile](/). Pick up to three counties and we'll send the outage history at the ZIP level so you can build your canvassing routes around it. --- ## Best door-to-door sales openers Published: 2026-06-01 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/best-door-to-door-sales-openers/ The strongest door-to-door opener in energy sales right now is a homeowner naming their own bad week back to them. "We heard Pacific Power had an outage around here last Friday afternoon. A tree took down a line. Did you folks get hit?" It's true, it's fresh, and it never says the word solar. That's why it works. This guide is for solar, battery, and generator sales teams and the reps they put on doors. Most doors close in the first five seconds, and almost none of them close because of the words. They close because the homeowner pattern-matched you to "someone selling something" before you finished your sentence. A good opener breaks that match. A bad one confirms it. Here's how the common ones stack up, ranked by how reliably each one earns the next thirty seconds. ## What is the best door-to-door sales opener? The fresh-outage observation is the best opener, and it isn't close. You name a real event the homeowner lived through days ago, ask about their experience, and say nothing about what you install. > "Hi, I'm [Name] with [Company]. We heard Pacific Power had an outage around here last Friday, a tree took down a line. Did you folks get hit?" It works on three levers at once. The specificity (a named utility, a day, a cause) reads as a neighbor who noticed, not a rep with a clipboard. The question is about them, not your product. And the pain is recent, so you're not creating a problem in their head. You're touching one that's already there. For a backup-power rep, a fresh outage is what a hailstorm is to a roofer: the event that tells you which doors are worth knocking, and the reason the homeowner is willing to talk. The one requirement is that it has to be true for *that house*. Which is the whole catch, and we'll come back to it. ## The opener tier list ### S-tier: the fresh-outage observation Covered above. The only opener that combines a real trigger, a question about the homeowner, and zero product mention. Its ceiling is the highest and its floor is still polite. The catch is sourcing: you need to actually know the house lost power, and when. Get that wrong and you're a stranger making things up on a porch. ### A-tier: the named neighbor > "I was just down the street working with your neighbor Adam on his place, and figured I'd stop by. Are you the homeowner?" Social proof plus a decision-maker check in one breath. Naming a real neighbor borrows trust you haven't earned yet, and the "are you the homeowner" tag means you don't waste the pitch on a teenager or a renter. It loses to the outage opener on freshness. It gives the homeowner a reason to trust you, but not a reason to care today. It also wears out fast on a single street, since the fourth house knows you said the same thing at the first three. ### A-tier: the curiosity pain point > "Quick question. Have you noticed your electric bill creeping up this year?" Opens a loop instead of triggering the brush-off, and like the outage line it never mentions the product. The meter-change variant ("did you know they swapped your meter, and how that changed your credits?") works the same way. It ranks just under the neighbor opener because the pain is real but not fresh. Everyone's bill is up, so it lands as a general gripe rather than a thing that happened to them on Tuesday. ### B-tier: the time-respecting easy out > "I'll be quick. If I'm interrupting dinner I can be gone in ten seconds, fair?" Giving the homeowner permission to dismiss you defuses the reflex to dismiss you. It buys breathing room, which is real, but it's a frame, not a hook. On its own it earns you ten seconds and nothing to fill them with, so it works best bolted onto one of the openers above rather than carrying the door by itself. ### C-tier: the generic question > "Hey, quick question for you..." Better than pitching, because at least it asks instead of tells. But with nothing specific behind it, the homeowner's guard stays up while they wait to find out what you're really there for. Forgettable. It doesn't lose you the door, but it doesn't win you anything either. ### F-tier: the feature-led pitch > "Hi, would you like to learn how solar can save you money?" This is the door-closer. You've announced you're selling, named the product, and asked them to volunteer for a pitch, all before saying one thing they care about. The homeowner doesn't even hear it as a question. They hear "salesperson," and the door is already moving. Every rep knows not to do this, and tired reps do it anyway around door ninety. ## Why does a fresh outage make the best opener? Because it's the only opener where the homeowner already agrees with your premise before you knock. They sat in the dark. They lost the food in the fridge. They know the grid let them down, so you skip the part where you convince them there's a problem and go straight to the conversation. The data backs how often this trigger is sitting there waiting. Erie County, New York had outage events on **76 of the last 90 days**. East Baton Rouge logged **74**. These aren't storm anomalies. They're chronic-outage counties where some street is freshly dark almost every day of the month. And where restoration drags, the frustration runs deeper: Oregon averages **7.6 hours** to restore power per event, and Nebraska **8.8**. A homeowner who spent most of a workday without power is a different conversation than a cold knock. We get into [what to say after the opener lands](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/) in a separate post. Generators, batteries, and solar all sell on the same pain here. The outage is the trigger; the product is just which fix you carry. ## What makes a door-to-door opener fail? Three things kill an opener, and they're the inverse of what makes the outage line work. Leading with the product tells the homeowner you're selling before you've earned a reason to listen. Saying nothing specific leaves their guard up. And skipping the introduction entirely, diving into "we heard there was an outage" with no name and no company, trips the "who is this stranger" reflex even when the rest of the line is good. That last one matters for the S-tier opener specifically. The outage observation is strong enough that reps want to lead with it cold, but a homeowner's first question is always *who are you*. Bolt a quick identity line on the front ("Hi, I'm [Name] with [Company]") and then drop the outage line. The introduction costs you two seconds and saves you the reflex. One more failure mode is getting caught on the follow-up. When the outage opener works, the homeowner sometimes asks "wait, how did you know we lost power?" Have a clean, true answer ready: the utility reported it themselves. Every outage you're working off of is one the power company posted on its own public outage map. "Your utility put it on their outage map, and I'm just knocking the street" is the whole truth, and it lands as ordinary instead of surveillance-y. ## How do reps know which houses lost power? The utility tells you. Every power company posts its outages on a public outage map, down to the area and cause, and the named-home version of that same data is what makes the S-tier opener usable instead of theoretical. The hard part is turning "this feeder lost power Friday" into "the Hendersons at 14 Oak Street lost power Friday," a specific, knockable door. That's the product. [GridProfile's per-home outage leads](/leads) resolve a fresh outage down to the owner name and street address for every home that lost power in your county, with the homes that already have solar, battery, or a generator dropped so you never knock a door that's already equipped. You walk up already knowing the house went dark Friday, which is the one fact the best opener in the business depends on. You don't need the named file to use the opener. You can knock a street you know lost power and play the odds. But the named list is the difference between "we heard there was an outage around here" and knowing, before you raise your hand to knock, that this house is the one. [Pricing scales with how tightly you filter](/pricing): loosen the filters for more doors at a lower price each, tighten for a smaller premium set. A couple of mechanics worth keeping regardless of which opener you run. Stand a step back from the door instead of crowding it, angle your stance, keep your hands visible. And when you set the next step, offer two times instead of asking an open question: "Should I swing back tomorrow at 6:30 or Saturday at 10?" beats "when works for you?" every time. The opener earns you the conversation. The fresh outage is what earns you the opener, and [picking the right territory](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/) is what puts fresh outages on your route. Where door-knocking sits next to bought lists, referrals, and ads is covered in our [full guide to getting solar leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/). [Grab a free grid profile](/) to see which ZIPs in your territory went dark this week, or [request your county](/leads) for the named doors behind them. --- ## How installers turn "power outages near me" into canvassing routes Published: 2026-05-27 | Updated: 2026-09-10 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-near-me/ If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, this post is for you. It's not another live outage map. If you just lost power and want to know when it's coming back, your utility's map is the right tool. This is about what your future customers do the moment the lights go out, and how to be standing on their porch a few days later. When a homeowner loses power, the first thing they type is "power outages near me." They want to know if it's just their house or the whole street. The utility map answers that for the current minute, then forgets it the moment the lights come back. For an installer, the useful version of that search is the inverse: which streets near a reported outage actually lost power, so a canvasser knocks the doors with a reason behind them instead of the whole block. GridProfile resolves every utility-reported outage with a known service area down to the specific streets that went dark, with house-number ranges on every one. That turns "power outages near me" from a live status check into a canvassing route. ## What does "power outages near me" actually tell you? A "near me" search shows the live outage footprint around one location, and nothing about history. The utility map draws a polygon over the affected area, gives an estimated restoration time, and erases the whole thing once power is restored. We covered [why those maps have no memory](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/) in a separate post. For a homeowner sitting in the dark, that's enough. They just want to know when it's coming back. For an installer, it's the wrong shape of data. By the time you'd knock the door, the polygon is gone and there's no record that the street ever lost power. The question that matters for canvassing isn't "what's out right now." It's "which streets near here lost power recently, and when." That answer doesn't exist on any public map. We went source by source on [where outage history by address actually lives](/insights/power-outage-history-by-address/) in a separate post. ## How do I find which streets near me lost power? No public source publishes outage history at the street level, so it has to be reconstructed from the raw events. Federal feeds like DOE ODIN and EAGLE-I report by county, averaging fifty to two hundred ZIPs into one line. Utility maps show the live polygon and drop it on restoration. GridProfile takes every event with a known polygon or service point and intersects it against an index of 164 million U.S. addresses across 38 states, then groups the result by street and ZIP. A test outage in Kirkland, Washington that the utility reported as 18 customers came back as 18 specific addresses on NE 68th Pl. The count matched the utility's number exactly. That's the resolution that makes a canvassing list possible: not "this ZIP had outages," but "these blocks on these streets lost power, and here are the house numbers." ## Why is knowing the street faster than canvassing a whole block? Because a block has many streets, and in any given outage only a few of them lost power. A ZIP code can hold hundreds of streets. A single outage event might touch a dozen. Canvass the whole area and most of the doors you knock belong to homes that never went dark. A rep working a list of the streets that actually lost power skips all of that. Every door on the list has a recent outage behind it, which means every knock comes with a reason to be there. You lead with the event: > "I saw your block on NE 68th Pl lost power last Tuesday. Equipment failure, about two hours. Have a minute?" That line costs nothing to deliver and it lands because it's true and specific. Compare it to walking a random block where you don't know which houses lost power and which didn't. You're back to a cold pitch on most doors. The difference isn't the script. It's whether you're standing in front of the right house. ## How much faster is street-level canvassing than random canvassing? The gain is in the reason-to-knock rate: the share of doors where a recent outage gives you something to lead with. Walk a full block blind and that share is small, because most homes on most blocks didn't lose power in the last event. Walk a list of named affected streets and it's nearly every door. A rep only knocks so many doors in a Saturday. Spend those knocks on streets that all lost power recently and the same effort covers far more qualified conversations than a blanket sweep of a neighborhood. The streets that lost power twice, the [repeat-victim blocks](/insights/power-outages-by-street/), are the highest-conviction stops of all, because the homeowner is already shopping for backup power before you reach the porch. Time spent walking past homes that never lost power is the hidden cost of canvassing without the data. Naming the streets removes it. ## How do I turn "outages near me" into a canvassing route? Pull the streets near your territory that lost power, sort them, and walk them in order. The Streets CSV lists every affected street with home-hours impact, a repeat-victim flag, cause history, and ZIP demographics on every row. Sort by total home-hours and the top of the list is Saturday's route. Sort by the repeat flag and you have a phone list. For direct mail, the Street-Level Outage Report PDF carries house-number ranges per street ("NE 68th Pl, 12320–12340, 8 homes") so a mail house can build a saturation route without geocoding anything. Every address is a clickable map link. At volume, mail houses pull the same addresses through a [power outage API](/insights/power-outage-api/) instead of by file. The same list serves all three verticals; you just sort it differently. Solar reps work the dense suburban streets with high rates and frequent short outages. Battery installers want those same blocks. Generator dealers work the exurban streets with long restorations. We mapped [which territories fit generators versus batteries](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/) on the same data. "Power outages near me" is the homeowner's search. The streets near them that lost power last week are yours. [Grab a free grid profile](/). Pick a state and up to three counties, and we'll email you the streets in your territory that lost power most recently, with house-number ranges and repeat-event flags on every row. --- ## When power poles catch fire Published: 2026-05-23 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/pole-fire-power-outages/ 137 power poles caught fire and took out the grid in the last 75 days. Each one kept the lights off for an average of **12.3 hours**, about four times longer than a typical outage. Together they cut power to more than **22,000 customers**, mostly in rural counties where the next pole is a long drive away. If you run a generator or battery sales team, those counties are worth knowing by name. A 12-hour outage is exactly the event that sells backup power. A pole fire is exactly what it sounds like: the wooden utility pole itself burns. It's a specific, labeled cause in utility outage data, separate from wildfires and storms, and it clusters in two very different parts of the country. ## What causes long power outages in Utah and the Mountain West? Pole fires are a leading cause of 12-hour-plus outages across the Mountain West. **Rocky Mountain Power** reported a pole fire in **Utah County, Utah** that cut **3,411 customers** on April 26, 2026. Nine days later, another Utah County pole fire kept **1,445 customers** out for **29.4 hours**. The same utility family (Rocky Mountain Power, **PacifiCorp**, and **Pacific Power**) logged pole fires across Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington in the same window. **Sweetwater County, Wyoming** lost 1,071 customers to a pole fire that took **33.5 hours** to restore. **Avista** reported a pole fire in **Nez Perce County, Idaho** that hit 1,062 customers. These aren't dense metros. They're counties with long distribution lines, few crews, and no quick fix when a pole burns down. ## Where are pole fires knocking out power? Pole fires split into two clusters. The Mountain West is one: Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, served by the PacifiCorp utilities and Avista. The other is **California's Central Valley**, where **PG&E** carries most of the load: - **Fresno County**: 1,968 customers out on April 13 (10.9 hours), then 1,256 more on May 12. - **Solano County**: 1,872 customers on April 1 (13.2 hours), with a second pole fire on May 13. - **San Joaquin County**: 1,582 customers on April 25, out for **20.6 hours**. - **Kern County**: 339 customers on April 1. This is a different grid than the wildfire-driven outages further south. We broke down the [full county-level California outage picture](/insights/california-power-outage-data/) separately. Pole fires are one slice of it, concentrated inland where PG&E's older distribution hardware meets dry, dusty heat. ## How long do pole-fire outages last? Pole-fire outages averaged **12.3 hours** to restore over the last 75 days. A normal outage in the same data runs about 3 hours, so a pole fire keeps a home dark roughly four times as long. The worst ran far longer: - **Sweetwater County, Wyoming**: 33.5 hours. - **Utah County, Utah**: 29.4 hours. - **Yakima County, Washington**: 23.3 hours (Pacific Power). - **San Joaquin County, California**: 20.6 hours. The reason is physical. You can't reset a breaker on a burned pole. A crew has to find it, kill the line, replace the pole, restring the wire, and re-energize, often on a rural road, sometimes overnight. ## Why do utility poles catch fire? A pole fire starts at the top, not the bottom. Leaking insulators, contamination on the hardware, and aging connectors let current arc across the surface of the pole. Add dust, salt, or pollen and a dry spell, and the wood ignites where the current is tracking. That's why pole fires concentrate where they do. The Central Valley and the high desert both run hot and dry, with airborne dust and old distribution lines. The hardware was built for a wetter, cooler grid than the one it's sitting on now. ## Are pole-fire counties good territory for backup power sales? Counties with repeat pole fires are strong backup-power territory. Utah County and Fresno County each had two separate pole fires in this window: the same neighborhoods losing power for 10 to 30 hours, more than once a season. A 12-hour outage is past the point a battery alone covers a house, which makes these counties a [whole-home generator pitch](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/) more than a battery one. A homeowner who sat through a 29-hour outage in May isn't debating whether to buy. They're picking a dealer. Pole fires also sit alongside the [other unusual outage causes](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/) (squirrels, balloons, cars into poles) that share one trait: when a single point of failure takes out hundreds of homes for half a day, that's a grid running with no redundancy. That's the signal backup-power dealers sell against, and it's the structural-decay end of the answer to [whether outages are getting worse](/insights/are-power-outages-getting-worse/). To see which ZIPs in these counties had recent outages, and which causes show up most, [grab a free grid profile](/). Pick your state and up to three counties and we'll email you the breakdown. --- ## Power outages by street, not just ZIP Published: 2026-05-15 | Updated: 2026-09-10 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-by-street/ Most solar, battery, and generator sales teams can already pick a hot county. The harder question, which street to knock on Saturday morning, is the one that decides whether canvassing pays for itself. For the last few years, the closest public answer was a ZIP code. GridProfile now resolves every utility-reported outage with a known service area down to the specific streets that lost power, with house-number ranges, repeat-event flags, and clickable map links on every address. That's the difference between a list of 76 ZIPs in Tarrant County and a list of the actual blocks where a homeowner sat in the dark last Tuesday. ## How do I find power outages by street? No public source publishes outage history at the street level. Utility outage maps show live polygons that disappear the moment power is restored. Federal datasets like DOE ODIN and EAGLE-I report by county, averaging fifty to two hundred ZIPs into one number. We walked through [where to actually find outages by ZIP](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/) in a companion post, and street-level is a tighter ask still. The way the data comes together is straightforward. Every event with a known polygon (or a known service point with a customer-count radius) gets intersected against an index of 164 million U.S. addresses across 38 states, with a small feather to catch addresses sitting at the polygon edge. The result is grouped by street and ZIP. A test outage in Kirkland, Washington that the utility reported as 18 customers came back as 18 specific addresses on NE 68th Pl. The address count matched the utility's number exactly. That's the resolution the deliverable runs at. ## What is a "repeat-victim street"? A repeat-victim street is a block hit by two or more separate grid events inside the reporting window. Same address, different fault: trees one week, equipment the next, a car versus a pole the week after. These streets are the highest-conviction door-knocking targets in any installer territory. A homeowner who lost power once last quarter is polite at the door. A homeowner who lost power three times in the last month is googling backup power on their phone before you finish your second sentence. The pitch on a repeat-victim block doesn't need a script: > "I saw your block on Marketplace Ln lost power three times this month. Latest was March 22, equipment failure each time. Have a minute?" That opening costs nothing to deliver and shifts the door from interruption to acknowledgment. The data isn't on any public map. ## Can I get street-level outage data for door-knocking and direct mail? Yes. That's exactly what the deliverable is built for. The Streets CSV lists every affected street in your territory with home-hours impact, repeat-victim flag, cause history, and ZIP-level demographics riding along on every row. Sort by `total_home_hours` and the top of the list is your canvas route for the week. Sort by `repeat_victim` and you have a phone list. For direct mail, the Street-Level Outage Report PDF carries house-number ranges per street ("NE 68th Pl, 12320–12340, 8 homes"), so a mail house can build a saturation list without geocoding anything. Every address in the PDF is a clickable Google Maps link, which makes route planning a two-click job. Mail houses running outage campaigns for many clients can take the same addresses as a daily feed through a [power outage API that returns addresses](/insights/power-outage-api/). The product split matters too. Solar reps work the dense suburban blocks with high rates and frequent short outages. Battery installers want the same blocks, especially the repeat-victims under four hours. Generator dealers work the exurban streets with long restorations. The same Streets CSV serves all three. You just sort by different columns. We broke down [which territories fit generators versus batteries](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/) on the same data set. ## Why don't utility outage maps show outages by street? Utility outage maps are built for the customer who just lost power, not the installer who wants outage history. They display the active polygon at this minute and erase it once restoration completes. The map has no memory. Even the polygon itself isn't broken down to the street names inside it. The utility cares which feeder is out, not which addresses sit on that feeder. The information exists (substation footprints, customer counts, restoration times), but it never reaches the public in a form an installer can act on. We covered [why so many outages don't even have a cause listed](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/) separately; street-level naming is the same problem one layer up. A few public-records and FOIA-style avenues exist for specific events, but they're slow, per-utility, and useless for territory planning where the question is "what happened last week." If your question is one specific address rather than a territory, we reviewed [every source for outage history by address](/insights/power-outage-history-by-address/) separately. ## What changes when you move from ZIP to street? The county tells you which metro to be in. The ZIP tells you which side of town. The street tells you which block. A solar rep who knows the ZIP is one of fifty reps calling that ZIP. A solar rep who knows that *12320 through 12340 NE 68th Pl* lost power for two hours last Tuesday, and that the same block lost it again two weeks later, is the only rep with the data to lead with the specific event. The conversation is different. For generator and battery dealers, the asymmetry is bigger. A homeowner who has already called three different dealers after a storm has heard the generic pitch. The dealer who walks up and names the date, the duration, and the cause (by street) closes faster. This is also why street data beats canvassing a block at random: knock only the streets that lost power and nearly every door comes with a reason behind it. We worked through [that canvassing math](/insights/power-outages-near-me/) separately. If you've been working a ZIP-level outage map and wondering whether the next step exists, this is it. We made the longer case for [outages by ZIP, not county](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/) when the previous level of resolution was the new thing. Streets are the next one. [Grab a free grid profile](/): pick a state and up to three counties, and we'll email you the streets in your territory that lost power most recently, with home-hours impact, repeat-victim flags, and the ZIP demographics on every row. --- ## Power outages in April 2026 Published: 2026-05-04 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-april-2026/ **Santa Clara County, California** lost **40,993 PG&E customers** in a single April 12 event. **Los Angeles County** lost **20,027 customers** to Southern California Edison on April 26, with a near-simultaneous **19,588** in a separate event the same day. **Sacramento** lost **13,515** to a damaged-equipment fault on April 10. PG&E and SCE were running cleanup crews for most of the month. Across the country, **Baltimore County, Maryland**, **Alameda County, California**, **Cameron County, Texas**, **Caddo Parish, Louisiana**, and dozens of other counties logged at least one outage event on every single day of the past month. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, those daily-outage counties are April's short-list. ## Which states had the most power outages in April 2026? **New Jersey, Maryland, and California** topped the country for outage event density in April 2026, with New Jersey averaging **541 outage events per county** in the last 30 days. For how these density numbers are built and what they mean, see the [state-by-state grid reliability ranking](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/). | State | Events | Counties Hit | Events per County | |-------|--------|--------------|-------------------| | New Jersey | 11,378 | 21 | 542 | | Maryland | 7,631 | 15 | 509 | | California | 21,798 | 58 | 376 | | Louisiana | 19,157 | 60 | 319 | | Texas | 59,778 | 216 | 277 | | Alabama | 15,600 | 58 | 269 | | Michigan | 17,627 | 70 | 252 | Texas had the largest raw event count by far, with nearly **60,000 outages across 216 counties**, but its sheer geographic size pulls the per-county density below the smaller, denser East Coast states. For an installer, the choice between density and volume comes down to whether you want to knock five doors on the same block or drive 40 minutes between appointments. That tradeoff is exactly what we worked through in [how to pick a solar sales territory](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/). California's number is dominated by PG&E and Southern California Edison territory. Louisiana's by Entergy and the cooperatives. New Jersey is JCP&L and PSE&G splitting the state. ## Which counties had the most outages last month? **Harris County, Texas** led the country with **8,413 outage events** across four reporting utilities. Tarrant County (Fort Worth) was second at **4,998**. Dallas County: **4,325**. Orleans Parish, Louisiana: **3,851**. | County | State | Events | |--------|-------|--------| | Harris | Texas | 8,413 | | Tarrant | Texas | 4,998 | | Dallas | Texas | 4,325 | | Orleans | Louisiana | 3,851 | | St. Louis | Missouri | 3,580 | | Jefferson | Alabama | 3,290 | | Cook | Illinois | 3,121 | | Hinds | Mississippi | 2,562 | | Montgomery | Texas | 2,522 | | Salt Lake | Utah | 2,211 | Texas dominates the top of this list because of how granularly its utilities report. A single localized outage in Houston shows up as one event whether it affected three customers or 7,000, so high event counts reflect both grid stress and reporting density. The biggest single events of April (the ones that knocked out tens of thousands of customers at a time) are listed further down. A separate cut of the data, counties with at least one outage on **every single day of the past month**, runs much longer. **Baltimore County, Maryland** led that list with **2,328 events across 31 days**. Caddo Parish, Louisiana: **1,310 events, 31 days**. Alameda County, California: **1,190 events, 31 days**. We pulled the [12-month version of that leaderboard](/insights/top-counties-grid-event-days/) in a separate post. ## What were the biggest single power outages in April 2026? The largest single April 2026 outage event was **Pacific Gas & Electric's April 12 outage in Santa Clara County, California**, which affected **40,993 customers** for about 80 minutes. The cause was logged as "unknown." Other notable single events from April: - **April 26, Los Angeles County, California.** Southern California Edison, 20,027 customers out for 8.6 hours. Cause logged as "Analyzing Problem." - **April 26, Los Angeles County.** SCE again, 19,588 customers, near-simultaneous to the first. Both stayed in "Analyzing Problem" status throughout the restoration. - **April 15, San Juan County, Washington.** Orcas Power & Light Coop, 15,062 customers, most of the San Juan Islands. - **April 10, Sacramento County, California.** Sacramento Municipal Utility District, 13,515 customers out for 17.7 hours. Cause: "Damaged equipment." - **April 18, Monterey County, California.** PG&E, 8,777 customers, status: "PATROLLING." - **April 12, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.** Duquesne Light, 8,714 customers, restored in about an hour. - **April 8, Pierce County, Washington.** Puget Sound Energy, 7,686 customers, "Under investigation." California showed up in the top single events more than any other state. The combination of long-duration restorations (Sacramento at 17.7 hours) and cause descriptions like "Analyzing Problem" or "PATROLLING" tells you what the homeowner experience looked like. The lights went off, and the utility had no answer. ## Which ZIP codes had the most power outage activity? The ZIP codes sitting on top of April's hottest counties are where installer canvassing has the most leverage. Those ZIPs share the same county-level grid infrastructure and the same outage history floor. In **Harris County, Texas** alone, that includes: - **77002, 77003, 77011** (Downtown Houston, East End) - **77006** (Montrose) - **77020, 77029** (North and Northeast Houston) - **77036, 77081** (Sharpstown, Gulfton) - **77041, 77088, 77091** (Northwest Houston) - **77375, 77389** (Tomball, Spring) - **77502, 77504** (Pasadena) - **77571** (La Porte) - **77586** (Seabrook) Every one of those ZIPs sits inside a county that logged **8,413 outage events** in 30 days. The county number is a shared floor across all of them, which is the limitation of county-level data. ZIP-level breakdowns inside the county show meaningful variation we covered in [why outage data needs to be ZIP-level, not county-level](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/). The same pattern holds in other April hot counties: - **Tarrant County, Texas** (4,998 events). Fort Worth metro ZIPs: 76101, 76104, 76110, 76112, 76116, 76123, 76134. - **Dallas County, Texas** (4,325 events). Dallas metro ZIPs: 75201, 75204, 75218, 75228, 75230, 75240. - **Orleans Parish, Louisiana** (3,851 events). New Orleans ZIPs: 70112, 70115, 70117, 70119, 70124, 70125, 70128. - **Cook County, Illinois** (3,121 events). Chicago ZIPs: 60601, 60607, 60614, 60618, 60625, 60629, 60632. - **Salt Lake County, Utah** (2,211 events). SLC metro ZIPs: 84101, 84105, 84109, 84115, 84117. For the actual outage history under any specific ZIP, see [how to find power outages by ZIP](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/). ## What caused most of the outages in April 2026? Most April 2026 outages had no public cause. The single largest "category" in the cause breakdown was **"Pending Investigation"** with **27,069 events**. Add in "Under Investigation," "Currently Assessing," "Investigating," "Under Evaluation," "Unidentified," and the various blanks, and the answer is the same as it was last month: the utilities themselves haven't said what broke. Of the events that did get a cause, the breakdown was familiar: - **Equipment failure.** "Equipment issue detected" (4,804), "Upgrading Equipment" (3,558), "Equipment Problems" (2,031). - **Storm damage.** 3,578 events, averaging 56 customers and 5.5 hours per event. - **Scheduled / planned.** Roughly 22,000 events across various "planned maintenance" labels. These should be filtered out of any outage analysis aimed at finding pain. They're not surprise outages. We covered the cause-attribution gap in detail in [why utilities don't explain outages](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/), and the bigger equipment-vs-weather story in [what actually causes US power outages](/insights/what-causes-us-power-outages/). ## How should installers use April's data going into May? April's data is a fresh canvassing list, and the [May 2026 edition](/insights/power-outages-may-2026/) is now up with the next month's numbers. Recent outages convert better than old ones. The homeowner who lost power on April 12 in Santa Clara, April 15 in the San Juan Islands, or April 26 in LA County is two-to-six weeks out from that experience right now, exactly the window where backup power and solar-plus-battery pitches land hardest. We wrote up [how to pitch solar after a power outage](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/) for the door conversation specifically, and [how installers use outage data for leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/) for where this data fits in the broader lead-gen mix. The pattern from April is clear: California, Texas, and the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic corridor are doing the heavy lifting on grid stress. The chronic counties that lost power on every single day of the month (Baltimore, Alameda, Caddo, Butler, Cameron, Albany, Burlington) are where every day of May gives an installer a fresh reason to knock. If you want the ZIP-level cut for your own state and counties, [grab a free grid profile](/). Pick up to three counties and we'll send the outage history at the ZIP level so you can build your canvassing routes around it. --- ## Top 25 counties by grid-event days Published: 2026-04-30 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/top-counties-grid-event-days/ Dallas County, Texas had at least one utility-reported grid event on **276 of the last 365 days**. That's about three days out of every four. It tops a leaderboard pulled from a year of utility-reported event data: not customer complaints, not news reports, but what the utilities themselves logged. The 25 counties below all crossed **250 event days** in the last 12 months. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, treat the list as a territory short-list: these are the counties where the grid fails often enough to knock on reputation alone. ## Which counties had the most grid-event days in the last 12 months? Dallas, Texas leads with 276 event days, followed by Alameda, Cook, and Salt Lake at 274 each. The top 10: | # | County | State | Event days | Total events | Avg customers | Max customers | |---|--------|-------|-----------:|-------------:|--------------:|--------------:| | 1 | Dallas | Texas | 276 | 6,000 | 92 | 25,466 | | 2 | Alameda | California | 274 | 1,986 | 255 | 10,593 | | 3 | Cook | Illinois | 274 | 5,346 | 101 | 63,645 | | 4 | Salt Lake | Utah | 274 | 3,399 | 131 | 18,820 | | 5 | Fulton | Georgia | 272 | 2,799 | 189 | 26,220 | | 6 | Tarrant | Texas | 270 | 6,562 | 89 | 35,248 | | 7 | San Bernardino | California | 269 | 1,621 | 714 | 96,650 | | 8 | Orange | California | 269 | 1,513 | 548 | 35,847 | | 9 | Maricopa | Arizona | 268 | 922 | 1,058 | 62,447 | | 10 | Ventura | California | 267 | 1,002 | 634 | 26,082 | Counties 11 through 25, by event days: 11. **Philadelphia, Pennsylvania**: 265 12. **San Diego, California**: 265 13. **Riverside, California**: 264 14. **Montgomery, Texas**: 263 15. **East Baton Rouge, Louisiana**: 262 16. **Santa Clara, California**: 259 17. **King, Washington**: 256 (largest single event in the dataset: 122,136 customers) 18. **Jefferson, Alabama**: 254 19. **Fresno, California**: 254 20. **Kern, California**: 253 21. **Montgomery, Pennsylvania**: 252 22. **Baltimore, Maryland**: 252 23. **Franklin, Ohio**: 252 24. **Collin, Texas**: 252 25. **Pinellas, Florida**: 250 A few notes before reading further: - **Event days** counts distinct calendar dates with at least one utility-reported event in the county. A county counts once for a date even if 50 events were logged that day. - **Total events** is the raw count of utility records in the window. Many small events drive this number up faster than a few big ones do. - **Avg customers** is the average customer count attached to each event. **Max customers** is the largest single event in the window. ## Does an event-day mean the lights went out? Not necessarily. This is utility-reported event data, not consumer-confirmed outage data. Utilities log a wide range of grid activity to systems like ODIN and EAGLE-I: planned switching, sub-feeder faults that self-cleared, equipment trips on backup paths, scheduled maintenance, and the obvious customer-facing events. Some of these events affected nobody at home. Some affected a single block. Some affected tens of thousands of customers at once. The avg-customers and max-customers columns hint at the spread, but the same event-day count can hide very different on-the-ground experiences. We report the data this way on purpose: we publish what the utilities themselves logged, and let the reader decide what to make of it. We covered [why utility cause reporting is so inconsistent](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/) in a separate post. ## Why are California counties so heavily represented? Eleven of the 25 counties on the list are in California. The state has a lot of populous counties, but the bigger driver is California's reporting density. Three large investor-owned utilities (PG&E, SCE, SDG&E) plus a network of municipal utilities all report events into the same public datasets, so a single Bay Area county might get logged events from four or five different reporters in a year. Texas takes 4 spots (Dallas, Tarrant, Montgomery, Collin). Pennsylvania has 2 (Philadelphia, Montgomery). The rest are spread across Illinois, Utah, Georgia, Arizona, Louisiana, Washington, Alabama, Maryland, Ohio, Florida, and Massachusetts. The [state-level grid reliability picture](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) lines up with most of those names. ## What does the same number look like across different counties? Two counties can sit next to each other at 270 event days and tell completely different stories. Look at three rows from the top 10: - **Tarrant, Texas** logged 6,562 events across 270 days, averaging 89 customers per event. That pattern is many small, short records on the wire. - **Maricopa, Arizona** logged 922 events across 268 days, averaging 1,058 customers per event. Fewer entries, each one larger when it landed. - **King, Washington** logged 1,802 events across 256 days, but a single event hit **122,136 customers**, the biggest of any county on the list. Same neighborhood on the leaderboard, three different shapes underneath. That's why we publish all four columns instead of one ranking number. The metric you sort by changes which counties look interesting. ## Where does this data come from? Three public sources feed the table: - **EAGLE-I**: The Department of Energy's utility event archive, covering all of 2025 across every state. This is the bulk of the 12-month window. - **ODIN**: The DOE's real-time event feed, running continuously from late August 2025 onward. Fills the gap from late summer through the present. - **Direct utility scrapers**: Roughly 25 utilities publish their own outage maps that we poll every few minutes. Most came online in late March 2026, so they contribute mainly to the last six weeks of the window. We deduplicate overlapping reports so the same event doesn't double-count when two sources both pick it up. The result is a single record per county, per event, with whatever cause and customer-count metadata the utility supplied. ## How does the recent picture compare to the 12-month list? The 90-day list barely overlaps with the 12-month one. Over the last 90 days, **Monroe County, New York** and **Erie County, New York** both lead with 43 event days, and neither cracks the 12-month top 25. Tulsa County, Oklahoma sits at 42 days. Sullivan County, New York and several Oregon and Louisiana counties are right behind. The shorter window weights the data toward our newest scrapers, which only came online in late March 2026 and report at finer granularity than the older archive. Over a year, EAGLE-I's broader-stroke reporting from California's IOUs and Texas's big-county utilities dominates the picture. The two windows aren't contradicting each other; they're showing the same grid through different lenses. ## What can you do with this data? Look at it for your county. The full list comes from [public utility-reported events](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/). Anyone can pull the same sources we did. If a county you work in is on the list, the underlying records are worth a closer look: when the events happened, which utility logged them, how many customers were attached, and which ZIPs they touched. A free [GridProfile report](/) gives you that breakdown for any state and up to 3 counties: the same data the leaderboard is built from, sliced down to your territory. Whether the events on it are full outages, planned switching, or something in between is the next question to ask. --- ## What actually causes US power outages Published: 2026-04-30 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/what-causes-us-power-outages/ Equipment failure caused **more than 22,000 power outage events** across the U.S. in the last 30 days. Storms and severe weather caused about **6,700**. The [aging-grid story](/insights/are-power-outages-getting-worse/) most installers already half-believe is sitting in the data, and it's bigger than weather by more than 3-to-1. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, that cause mix is raw pitch material. The follow-up is more interesting: the cause that keeps the power off longest isn't equipment failure or storms. It's the trees. ## What is the leading cause of power outages in the US? Equipment failure. Across the last 30 days of utility-reported grid events, equipment-related causes drove **more than 22,000 outage events**, roughly 3.5 times the volume of every weather and storm category combined. The mix breaks down by sub-category: - **Equipment Problems**: averaged **9.5 hours** to restore, **101 customers per event** (1,766 events) - **Upgrading Equipment** (proactive replacements where power stays out): **9.7 hours**, **104 customers** (3,116 events) - **Pole Upgrade** (pole replacements): **10.7 hours**, **79 customers** (954 events) - **Equipment Failure** (the explicit label): **7.5 hours**, **44 customers** (1,199 events) - **Damaged Equipment**: **9.6 hours**, **29 customers** (701 events) These aren't the dramatic, telegenic outages that lead the news. They're the slow grind of a grid that needs more replacement than it's getting. One pole goes down, 100 customers lose power for nine hours, the utility sends a single crew, and nobody outside the affected ZIP knows it happened. ## Are storms the main cause of power outages? No. Across the same 30 days, weather-related causes (Storm Damage, Severe Weather, Weather Related) totaled roughly **6,700 events**. Equipment failure outpaced them by more than 3-to-1. Storms are more *visible*. A single severe-weather front can knock out tens of thousands of customers in one event and dominate the news cycle. Storm Damage events averaged **56 customers per event** in the data, much higher than equipment-failure events. So when storms hit, they hit hard. But over a year, the equipment failures add up. Roughly 89% of US outage events with an identified cause are equipment-related, not weather-related. If your mental model of grid reliability is "the weather got bad," you're missing the bigger chunk of the data. ## Which cause keeps the power off longest? Vegetation contact. When a tree takes down a line, restoration averages **11 to 12 hours** in the worst sub-categories. The data label "Trees" averaged **12.5 hours per event** across 1,159 events in 30 days. "Damage from tree" averaged **11.0 hours**. Even the cleaner sub-categories ("Vegetation" and "03 Vegetation") average 6 to 7 hours, longer than typical equipment or weather restoration. Why it lasts: a fallen tree usually means a snapped span of wire, not a blown fuse. Crews have to clear the tree, replace the conductor, sometimes reset a transformer, and re-energize. Half-day outages aren't unusual. The pattern is regional. In Michigan, where ice loads and heavy canopy combine, [vegetation-caused outages average over 12 hours](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/), among the longest in the country. New Hampshire averages **20.5 hours per outage** state-wide. New York averages **15.3 hours** across more than 14,000 events. The implication for solar + battery sales is direct. A 30-minute outage barely registers with a homeowner. A 12-hour outage rearranges their week. ## Why don't utilities explain most outages? They mostly don't. **83% of all U.S. outage events** in recent data have no identified cause in public feeds: the utility logged the outage but left the cause field blank, "Pending Investigation," or "PATROLLING." Only about **17% of events** carry a real explanation. The cause numbers above describe a slice of the data: the slice that's actually labeled. The full picture, including the unexplained majority, is in our [breakdown of why utilities don't report cause data](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/). Some utilities (Southern California Edison, Consumers Energy) report causes for nearly every event. Others (Entergy, Georgia Power, Alabama Power) don't include a cause field in their public APIs at all. The cause data is partial because the reporting is partial. ## What does this mean for solar and battery sales? It changes both which counties are worth working and which outages are worth pitching against. The equipment-failure majority means the weakest grids aren't always in storm-prone states. Counties with high event counts and high equipment-failure rates have utilities running infrastructure past its useful life. That risk is year-round, not seasonal. A county that gets 200 equipment-related events a quarter has the same exposure in calm weather as in storm season. Vegetation duration is where battery storage justifies itself. A homeowner who lost power for 30 minutes shrugs and forgets. A homeowner who lost power for 12 hours starts comparing battery brands. The [strange causes we covered separately](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/) (squirrels, balloons, vehicles into poles) get the headlines, but vegetation has the longest tail and the strongest pitch hook. The three pieces of outage data an installer should actually pull from a territory: 1. **Frequency**: how often the grid breaks in a given ZIP, regardless of cause 2. **Duration**: average restoration hours, which separates inconvenience from frustration 3. **Cause mix**: when available, whether the problem is structural (equipment) or seasonal (vegetation, weather) The [GridProfile reports](/) give all three at the ZIP level. Sort by recent events to find where the grid just broke. Sort by repair hours to find where the homeowner sat in the dark long enough to listen. --- ## How to find power outages by ZIP Published: 2026-04-28 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/ If you've searched for "power outages by ZIP code" and ended up on a utility outage map showing what's out right now, you already know the problem. Real-time maps tell you which substations are down at this exact minute. They don't tell you what happened last Tuesday, last quarter, or all of last year. And the federal data that does cover history mostly stops at the county. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team trying to plan a territory, that's the wrong shape of data. ## Where can you find power outages by ZIP code? There are three places people end up when they search for power outages by ZIP, and each one has a different gap. The first is utility outage maps, which show live status for the customers of one provider. The second is federal outage data from the Department of Energy, which covers history but reports at the county level. The third is news coverage of specific events, which is hit-or-miss and never granular. None of those answer the question an installer actually has, which is what has happened in this ZIP over the last few weeks or months, and how often. ## Do utility outage maps show outages by ZIP code? Utility outage maps show outages by service area, not by ZIP code, and they only show what's out at this moment. A live outage map is built for the customer who just lost power. It shows colored shapes over the utility's service territory. Click one and you see something like "1,200 customers affected, estimated restoration 9:30 PM." When the lights come back on, the shape disappears. The map has no memory. That's not a knock on the utilities. The maps work for what they're built for. But for a solar or generator installer trying to figure out which neighborhoods to canvass, a snapshot of the current minute is the wrong frame. You need history, not status. A few utilities publish more, but the data is fragmented across hundreds of providers, formatted differently in every state, and rarely tagged at the ZIP level even when it does exist. ## What about government power outage data? The Department of Energy collects outage data from every utility in the country, but the public version is mostly reported at the county. The two main feeds are EAGLE-I, a historical archive run by Oak Ridge National Lab, and ODIN, the newer real-time system. Both publish event-level records with start times, customer counts, and cause descriptions when the utility provides one. Both stop at the county. Counties are the wrong unit for door-to-door work. A typical urban county covers 50 to 200 ZIP codes. The county number averages all of them into a single line in a spreadsheet. That's fine for regulators and useful for state-level reporting. It's almost useless if you're trying to decide which side of town your team should hit on Saturday. We covered the [county vs. ZIP gap](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/) in more detail in a separate post. ## What does ZIP-level outage data actually show you? ZIP-level outage data shows the count and pattern of outages inside individual neighborhoods, not just the county that contains them. The kind of detail that becomes possible at the ZIP level: - How many outages a specific ZIP has had in the last 7, 30, or 90 days. - The largest single event in that ZIP, including how many customers it affected and how long it lasted. - Which causes show up most often: vegetation, equipment failure, animal contact, weather, or simply "unknown." We dug into [why so many outages have no cause listed](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/) in a separate post. - Which ZIPs in the same county have been quiet, and which ones keep showing up week after week. That's the data installers need to pick canvassing routes, time pitches to recent events, and route inbound leads. ## How do solar and generator installers pull this data? Most installers don't pull ZIP-level outage data themselves. The DIY version means stitching together feeds from dozens of utilities, the DOE archives, and demographic data, then maintaining the pipeline as utilities change formats. It's months of work to assemble and ongoing work to keep current. Most installers we work with had spent time trying. The honest answer is that solo installers and small shops can't justify the build. Even large national installers usually buy or partner for it. We built [GridProfile](/) for the installers who don't want to spend a quarter assembling data they need this week. Pick a state and up to three counties and we email you back a free profile with the ZIP-level outage history for your territory. Solar reps use it for [territory planning](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/). Generator dealers and battery installers use it for [demand mapping](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/). If you want to take it one resolution finer, we now [resolve outages down to the specific streets that lost power](/insights/power-outages-by-street/), with house-number ranges and repeat-victim flags. It's the closest answer there is to "find outages by street." And if the question behind your search was a single specific address, we reviewed [every source for outage history by address](/insights/power-outage-history-by-address/) separately. If "power outages by ZIP" was the search that brought you here, that's the right question. The answer just isn't on a public map. --- ## Power outages by ZIP, not county Published: 2026-04-28 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/ Tarrant County, Texas logged nearly **5,000 outage events** in the last 30 days. That number tells a solar or generator installer that the Fort Worth metro is a hot territory. It doesn't tell you whether to spend Saturday in Arlington, Bedford, or Mansfield. Tarrant County alone spans 76 ZIP codes, and the outage history under each one is not the same. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, that gap, between county-level numbers and ZIP-level reality, is where most territory plans go wrong. ## Why does ZIP-level outage data matter for installers? ZIP-level outage data shows you which specific neighborhoods inside a hot county have actually lost power, and which haven't. A homeowner who sat in the dark for six hours last Tuesday is a different conversation than a neighbor across town whose grid hasn't blinked all year. They're both inside the same county, often inside the same utility territory, sometimes only a few miles apart. County-level maps put them in the same bucket. ZIP-level data doesn't. Solar reps notice this at the door. People who recently lost power are listening. People who haven't are polite at best. For generator dealers and battery installers, the same gap is the whole pitch. A whole-home generator is a backup-power purchase. The buyer is someone who has lived through outages, not someone who has read about them. ## Why do county-level outage maps miss the point? County-level maps treat 50 to 200 ZIPs as a single number, and that average smooths out the data points an installer actually needs. A typical urban county might have a downtown grid that almost never fails and an exurban grid that fails every other week. The county total averages those out and tells you nothing about either. The same is true for almost every metro in the country. Tree cover, line age, weather exposure, substation density. All of these vary block by block. Counties don't. That's why a "hot county" you picked off a state map can still feel cold when your reps spend a weekend canvassing the wrong half of it. ## How much do outages vary between ZIPs in the same county? Outage frequency between ZIPs in the same county routinely varies by an order of magnitude. A few patterns we see often: - A coastal county where the inland ZIPs see two outages a month and the bayou-facing ZIPs see twelve. - An urban county where downtown ZIPs almost never lose power and exurban ZIPs lose it weekly. - A storm-belt county where one substation footprint takes the brunt of every event and the rest of the county barely notices. The county number is the same in every one of those cases. The on-the-ground reality isn't. ## What do solar and generator installers do with ZIP-level data? Solar and generator installers use ZIP-level outage data to prioritize neighborhoods, time their pitch to recent events, and stop wasting drive time on blocks where nothing has happened. A few of the practical uses we hear from installers: - **Canvassing routes**: pull the ZIPs in the service area with the most recent outage activity, work those first. - **Inbound lead routing**: when a lead comes in, the rep can see how many outages that ZIP has had in the last 30 days and lead the call with the local number. - **Post-outage timing**: a ZIP that just had a multi-hour outage is a different conversation for the next two weeks than the same ZIP six months later. - **Generator and battery sizing**: frequency and duration patterns by ZIP shape the runtime, fuel-supply, and battery-hour conversation. We broke down the [generator vs. battery split](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/) in a separate post. The product is different. The data move is the same: get out of the county view. ## How do you get power outage data by ZIP code? Most installers can't pull ZIP-level outage data on their own. Public sources stop at the county, utility feeds are fragmented, and the assembly work runs into hundreds of hours. We walk through [where to actually find outages by ZIP](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/) in a companion post. We built [GridProfile](/) to skip that work. Pick a state and up to three counties and we send back the ZIP-level outage history for your territory: which ZIPs had outages, how often, how long they lasted, and which ones look ripe for a [solar territory plan](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/) or a backup-power pitch. If you've been working off a county map, the move to ZIP is the single biggest jump in canvassing efficiency we see installers make. The next jump, [street-level beats ZIP for canvassing specifically](/insights/power-outages-by-street/), is the same logic one resolution finer. --- ## California power outage data Published: 2026-04-12 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/california-power-outage-data/ California had **20,711 power outage events** across **58 counties** in the last 30 days. Those events affected **1.56 million customers**. Six counties lost power on **23 of the last 30 days**. The state pays **36.2 cents per kWh** for residential electricity, the highest rate in the country. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, that combination of frequency, scale, and cost is hard to beat anywhere else in the U.S. ## How often do power outages happen in California? **20,711 times in 30 days**, or about 690 events per day across the state. That's **353 events per county** on average, the second-highest density in the country behind New Jersey (393 per county). We covered the [full state-by-state density ranking](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) in a separate post. Six counties had outages on **23 of the last 30 days**: - **Los Angeles County**: 1,974 events, with single events reaching 5,883 customers - **San Diego County**: 515 events, max single event at 4,244 customers - **San Bernardino County**: 884 events, max 4,016 customers - **Ventura County**: 483 events, max 6,285 customers - **Kern County**: 1,040 events, max 5,585 customers - **Orange County**: 754 events, max 2,357 customers These aren't storm recovery zones. They're counties where the grid breaks almost every day, all month. ## Which California counties have the most outage events? **Los Angeles County** led with **1,974 events**, averaging **131 customers per event**. When LA loses power, it hits hard. A single event in LA knocked out 5,883 customers at once. The top 10 California counties by 30-day event count: 1. **Los Angeles**: 1,974 events 2. **Santa Clara**: 1,176 events 3. **Kern**: 1,040 events, 3 utilities reporting 4. **Alameda**: 1,007 events 5. **Fresno**: 941 events, 3 utilities reporting 6. **San Bernardino**: 884 events, averaging 141 customers per event 7. **Contra Costa**: 801 events, with one event reaching 6,290 customers 8. **Riverside**: 776 events, averaging 149 customers per event 9. **Orange**: 754 events, averaging 178 customers per event 10. **San Mateo**: 664 events Sacramento had fewer total events (446) but one event took out **13,515 customers** at once. Madera County had an event affecting **7,023 customers**. Volume doesn't tell the whole story. Some of these counties are dropping entire cities at a time. ## What causes power outages in California? That depends on which utility you ask. **PG&E** explains only **4.2%** of its outage events. **Southern California Edison** explains **88-91%**. PG&E reported **13,304 events** in California in the last 30 days. Of those, 12,569 had no identified cause. The cause field in PG&E's data usually says "PATROLLING" (crew sent to investigate), "PLNND SHUTDOWN," or "EMERG REPAIRS." These are status updates, not causes. We looked at this [utility transparency gap nationally](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/) and PG&E is one of the worst reporters in the country. SCE is different. Its **3,584 events** had causes listed for nearly 90%. When SCE says "equipment failure" or "tree contact," you can use that data. From the events that do have causes: - **Equipment upgrades and failures** are the top category. Proactive upgrades average **8.4 hours** to restore. Equipment problems average **9.1 hours** and hit **91 customers** per event. - **Underground cable damage** accounts for 151 events at **8.4 hours** average. Pole upgrades: 789 events at **9.7 hours**. These are long outages. - **Tree contact** caused 86 events at **7.2 hours** average, affecting an average of **177 customers** each. - **Pole fires** hit Solano County (360 customers, 13.2 hours), Kern County (339 customers, 7.3 hours), and Merced County (128 customers, 11.3 hours) in a single week. PG&E reported all of them. The [unusual causes](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/) show up in California too. Mylar balloons knocked out 900+ customers in LA over one weekend. Butte County lost 3,034 customers to a foreign object. ## How long do California power outages last? The average is **5.2 hours**. But the 90th percentile is **12.1 hours**. That gap is the story. Most California outages resolve within a few hours. But one in ten lasts half a day or longer. Equipment failures and pole upgrades push restoration past 8-9 hours. Underground cable damage averages 10.6 hours. A homeowner who hits one of those long-tail events is sitting in the dark for most of a working day. At **36.2 cents per kWh**, California has the highest residential electricity rate in the country. That rate does two things for solar sales: it shortens the payback period on a solar install, and it means the hourly cost of not having power (running a portable generator, lost food, lost work) is higher than anywhere else. We walked through [how to use rate data in a solar pitch](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/) in a separate post. ## What are the best California counties for solar sales? Counties with high outage events, high owner-occupancy, and high home values are where solar pitches convert fastest. In California, those are: - **Contra Costa County**: 801 events, **65.7% owner-occupied**, median home value **$866,800**, 21.3% work from home - **El Dorado County**: 351 events, **62.2% owner-occupied**, $679,900 median home value, 22.1% WFH - **Amador County**: 127 events, **68% owner-occupied**, $449,800 median home value - **Solano County**: 366 events, **60.3% owner-occupied**, $617,700 median home value - **Sonoma County**: 430 events, **57.6% owner-occupied**, $815,500 median home value LA and Orange counties have the most events but lower owner-occupancy rates (around 50% and below). That means more renters who can't buy solar. The mid-size Bay Area and inland counties often have better ratios for door knocking. Counties with high work-from-home rates are worth extra attention. Marin County has **31.5% WFH**. San Francisco: **31%**. Alameda: **25.7%**. Nevada County: **25%**. A remote worker who loses power loses a day of income. That's a different conversation than someone who comes home from the office to a warm fridge. For the ZIP-level breakdown in any of these counties (which neighborhoods had events this week, how long they lasted, and what percentage of homes are single-family), [grab a free grid profile](/). --- ## Are power outages getting worse? Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/are-power-outages-getting-worse/ The U.S. grid logged over **210,000 outage events** across **46 states** in the last 30 days. Whether that's "worse" than last year depends on what you measure and where you look. National trend data is noisy. But the seasonal patterns, cause breakdowns, and state-level density numbers tell you something more useful: when and where outages hit hardest, and what's behind them. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, the trend question is really a territory question, and the data answers that one much more clearly. ## Are power outages getting worse? The honest answer: it depends on the state. **New Jersey** is running **393 outage events per county** per month right now. Every one of its 21 counties had repeated outages. **California** hit **353 events per county** with nearly **1.55 million customers** affected in 30 days. These are high numbers by any measure. National year-over-year trend data is hard to pin down because reporting standards vary by utility and coverage has changed over time. What the data does show clearly is that some states have persistent, structural grid problems that aren't getting better. Equipment failure is the top identified cause. Vegetation contact peaks every spring. The states with the worst density numbers today (New Jersey, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Utah) are the same ones that show up in historical data year after year. For solar and backup power sales, the trend question matters less than the current state. A county averaging **393 events per month** doesn't need to be "getting worse" to be a good territory. It's already bad enough. We covered the [full state-by-state density breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) in a separate post. ## When do most power outages happen? **Spring is the peak.** April leads all months with **147,094 events** in historical data, followed by March at **117,557**. Summer months average about 25,000 events each. Winter months sit around 15,000-16,000. That breaks a common assumption. Most people expect summer heat or winter storms to be the worst. The data says otherwise: spring storms, wind, and vegetation growth drive the highest volume by a wide margin. Time of day matters too. Outages peak between **1:00 PM and 4:00 PM** (UTC), with **33,950 events** logged during the 3:00 PM hour, nearly four times the volume at 7:00 AM. Weekdays see more events than weekends: **Wednesday** leads with 75,735 events, while **Sunday** is the quietest at 50,331. For door-knocking teams, the timing is practical. The neighborhoods losing power on a Tuesday afternoon are the ones where homeowners are most frustrated by Wednesday morning. If you're using [ZIP-level outage data to plan your canvassing routes](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/), recency matters more than totals. ## Which states have the most outage activity right now? The top five states by events per county in the last 30 days: 1. **New Jersey**: 393 events/county, 8,254 total events, 95,195 customers affected 2. **California**: 353 events/county, 20,478 total events, nearly **1.55 million** customers affected 3. **Maryland**: 348 events/county across just 15 counties, 12,559 customers affected 4. **Massachusetts**: 203 events/county, 43,108 customers affected 5. **Utah**: 189 events/county, 96,403 customers affected **Texas** has the most raw events at **32,818** but they spread across 213 counties, dropping its density to 154 per county. For territory planning, density tells you more than volume. We covered why in our [state-by-state grid reliability breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/). **California** stands out for customer impact: **1.55 million customers** affected in 30 days, the most of any state. Pennsylvania is second at 321,652. When a California event fires, it hits an average of 76 customers. In Texas, the average is 8. Same grid, very different impact per event. ## What causes most power outages? **Equipment failure** is the [top identified cause](/insights/what-causes-us-power-outages/). Subcategories like "Upgrading Equipment" (2,747 events, **8.4 hours** average restoration) and "Equipment Problems" (1,485 events, **9.1 hours** average) are the longest to fix and affect the most customers per event: an average of 115 customers for equipment upgrades and 92 for equipment problems. **Vegetation contact** (tree limbs hitting power lines) accounts for over 1,000 events in the last 180 days at **6 hours** average restoration. Spring growth makes this worse every year between March and May. Animals, balloons, vehicles, and other [unusual causes](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/) add another 1,400+ events on top. The biggest category is **"unknown"**: utilities reporting "under investigation" or "pending" for the majority of events. We found that [83% of all outage events go unexplained](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/) in public data, with some utilities reporting zero causes across thousands of events. Whether the grid is struggling because of aging infrastructure, deferred maintenance, or weather patterns, the utilities themselves often don't say. What the cause data tells you as a solar or backup power installer: equipment failure and vegetation aren't going away. These are structural problems, not one-time events. A county with recurring equipment failures has aging infrastructure that will keep breaking. That's a territory worth working. We broke down the [March 2026 cause data county by county](/insights/power-outage-data-march-2026/), and looked separately at the longest-burning failure mode: [power poles that catch fire](/insights/pole-fire-power-outages/). If you want to see which ZIPs in your territory had outages this week, [grab a free grid profile](/) and we'll send you the breakdown by county, cause, and restoration time. --- ## Generator and battery demand hotspots Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-17 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/ **Monroe County, New York** lost power on **25 of the last 90 days**. Erie County: also 25. King County, Washington: 24. Pierce County, Washington: 24. These aren't storm zones recovering from a single event. These are counties where the grid fails multiple times a week, month after month. Every one of those outage days is a homeowner thinking about backup power. (Over a 12-month window, the [chronic-county leaderboard shifts toward California and Texas](/insights/top-counties-grid-event-days/); same metric, different lens.) If you run a generator dealership or a battery install crew, this map is for you: the same outage data that solar installers use to pick territories works for backup power. The signals are just slightly different. ## Where is demand highest for whole-home generators? Counties with long, infrequent outages are the best generator territories. When power stays out for 8, 12, or 50 hours, a battery alone can't keep a house running. That's where whole-home generators sell. **New York** is the top generator market in the country right now. The state averages **49.7 hours** to restore power, five times the national median. Monroe County had outages on 25 of the last 90 days. Erie County logged **520 events** in the same window, with single events hitting **2,345 customers**. Sullivan County, Ulster County, Saratoga County, and Dutchess County each had outages on 23-24 of 90 days. Other strong generator territories by restoration time: - **Puerto Rico**: **13.0 hours** average restoration, with a 90th-percentile of **30.6 hours**. One in ten outages lasts more than a full day. - **Nevada**: **12.8 hours** average, 90th-percentile at **22.4 hours**. - **New Hampshire**: **11.9 hours** average across 311 events. Rural grid, long repair drives. - **Oregon**: **7.4 hours** average across **5,595 events**. Jackson County alone had outages on 23 of 90 days with events hitting up to **1,917 customers**. A homeowner who sat in the dark for 12 hours last Tuesday doesn't need a pitch. They need a quote. This post maps the territories; for how dealers actually source and work the list, see [generator leads from outage data](/insights/generator-leads-from-outage-data/). ## Which areas need home battery storage most? Dense, high-rate markets with frequent short outages are the best battery territories. A **10-kWh battery** covers a typical home for 4-6 hours. If outages in a county rarely exceed that window, batteries are the right product. **New Jersey** leads with **393 outage events per county** per month (the highest density in the country), but average restoration is under 4 hours. That's a battery market, not a generator market. All 21 counties had outages. At **27.6 cents/kWh** in counties like Atlantic and Cape May, the economics work for daily rate arbitrage on top of backup. **Maryland** had **348 events per county** across just 15 counties with an average restoration of **4.6 hours**. **Massachusetts** hit **203 events per county**, with Essex County logging outages on 23 of 30 days. Both states have restoration times that fit inside a battery's runtime and electricity rates high enough to justify the install on savings alone. We break down how installers source and work these markets in [battery backup installer leads](/insights/battery-backup-installer-leads/). **California** is the hybrid case: **353 events per county**, **36.2 cents/kWh** rates, but a 90th-percentile restoration of **12.1 hours**. That long tail means some customers need batteries for the typical 3-hour flicker, and some need a generator for the 12-hour events. Counties like Contra Costa (**791 events**, 65.7% owner-occupied) and Alameda (**992 events**, 51.1% owner-occupied) have enough volume to support both product lines. ## How do generator dealers use power outage data? Generator dealers use outage data to find the counties where backup power isn't a luxury; it's the next purchase a homeowner makes after a bad week. Three data points separate a productive territory from a dead one: 1. **Restoration time**: States averaging 8+ hours per outage are generator territory. New York (**49.7 hours**), Nevada (**12.8 hours**), and New Hampshire (**11.9 hours**) top the list. We covered the full [state-by-state grid breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) with density scores for every state. 2. **Chronic outage days**: A county with outages on 20+ of the last 90 days has homeowners who've already decided they need backup. They're comparing options, not debating whether to buy. Monroe and Erie counties in New York, King and Pierce counties in Washington, and East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana all hit 23-25 outage days in 90. 3. **Single-family home density**: Generators go on pads next to houses. A county with 70% single-family homes is a better install market than one with 40% apartments. Census table B25024 breaks this down by ZIP. We explain [how to filter ZIPs by housing type](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/) for territory planning. Generator dealers who wait for inbound calls after a storm are competing with every other dealer in the region. Dealers who prospect the ZIPs that lost power last week, before the next storm hits, close faster and compete with fewer quotes. ## What's the difference between battery and generator territories? Battery territories have frequent, short outages and high electricity rates. Generator territories have infrequent, long outages and rural housing. Here's how the same data splits into two different product markets: **Battery territory signals:** - Outages averaging **under 4 hours** to restore - High events-per-county density (200+ per month) - Electricity rates above **20 cents/kWh** (rate arbitrage adds ROI beyond backup) - Dense suburban housing with high owner-occupancy **Generator territory signals:** - Outages averaging **8+ hours** to restore - Lower event density but higher impact per event - Rural or exurban housing with larger lots (room for a pad and gas line) - Limited grid redundancy (single utility, long repair drives) Some markets are both. **Louisiana** had **10,632 events** across 60 parishes in 90 days (that's high frequency), but East Baton Rouge Parish had outages on 23 of 90 days and events hitting **730 customers** at once. The short outages sell batteries. The long ones sell generators. A dealer who carries both can sort their pipeline by ZIP-level restoration times. We covered [where to find power outages by ZIP](/insights/how-to-find-power-outages-by-zip/) for installers who want to source this themselves. **Washington** is similar. King County had outages on 24 of 90 days with events reaching **7,090 customers**. Pierce County hit **7,686 customers** in a single event. Urban King County ZIPs with 3-hour outages are battery territory. Rural Pierce County ZIPs with 10-hour outages are generator territory. Same county-level data, different product for different ZIPs. ## Can the same outage data work for solar, generators, and batteries? Yes. The underlying data is the same: grid events, restoration times, customer counts, housing type, electricity rates. What changes is which columns you sort by. Solar installers sort by **event count + electricity rates + single-family %**. A ZIP with frequent outages, high rates, and detached homes is a solar pitch. Battery installers sort by **event frequency + short restoration + high rates**. Generator dealers sort by **long restoration + chronic outage days + rural housing**. GridProfile pulls from the same government sources for all three ([ODIN, EAGLE-I, Census, and EIA rate data](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/)) and stitches them together at the ZIP level. The solar installer and the generator dealer looking at Harris County, Texas see the same **4,997 events** across 3 utilities. The solar installer targets the suburban ZIPs with high rates and short outages. The generator dealer targets the exurban ZIPs with long restoration times and big lots. The [March 2026 data](/insights/power-outage-data-march-2026/) shows both patterns county by county. The backup power market is growing because the grid isn't getting more reliable. Counties that had outages on 20+ days in the last 90 aren't going to suddenly stop. If you sell generators, batteries, or solar, the same outage data tells you where your next customer lives. [Grab a free grid profile](/) to see the ZIP-level breakdown for your counties. --- ## Grid Reliability by State Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/ Every utility in America reports grid disturbances: to the Department of Energy, on its own public outage map, or both. Almost nobody joins that reporting into one picture. We do, every day, across all 50 states. This page ranks every state by what its grid actually did in **May 2026 (May 1–31)**: outage events, customers hit, how much of the state was affected, how long the median outage lasted, and how often the utility explained itself. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, read the table as a territory map: outage density and restoration times tell you where backup power sells. The national totals for the month: **516,481 utility-reported outage events** across **2,443 counties** in all 50 states plus DC, affecting a cumulative **20.0 million customers** (GridProfile analysis of DOE ODIN plus 160+ direct utility and cooperative feeds). One month is the honest window for this table. Our feed coverage has grown month over month, so a "last 12 months" ranking would partly measure when we added each utility, not how each grid performed. A single, fully-covered calendar month compares states on equal footing. The monthly recaps ([May](/insights/power-outages-may-2026/), [April](/insights/power-outages-april-2026/), and [March](/insights/power-outage-data-march-2026/)) re-run this picture every month; this page explains how to read it. ## Which states had the most power outages? By raw event count, May 2026 looked like this at the top: 1. **Texas: 93,084 events, 3.0M customers hit.** Nearly one in five U.S. outage events last month happened in Texas. Heat, storms, and a grid that spans 254 counties, 225 of which logged at least one event. Harris County alone (Houston) recorded more events than 40 entire states. ERCOT's isolation from the national grid gets the headlines, but the day-to-day story is volume: the sheer number of feeders, poles, and transformers serving 26 million customers. 2. **California: 28,619 events, 3.0M customers hit.** Fewer events than Texas but the same customer impact: California's events are bigger. The state's median restoration of 3h 23m also runs an hour and a quarter longer than Texas. We broke down the [county-by-county California data](/insights/california-power-outage-data/) separately. 3. **Pennsylvania: 27,389 events.** The quiet member of the top three. Every one of its 67 counties logged events, and at 409 events per county it ranks above Texas on density. Its saving grace is speed: a 1h 27m median restoration, among the fastest in the country. 4. **Ohio: 22,436 events.** Same pattern as Pennsylvania: full-state coverage (88 of 88 counties), high volume, middling 2h 15m restorations. 5. **New York: 22,235 events, 96% unexplained.** High volume and one of the worst cause-reporting rates among large states. Utilities identified a cause for fewer than one event in twenty. Florida, the state everyone guesses first, came in tenth, with 16,298 events. May is before hurricane season; its position in this table moves more across the year than any other large state. Its 4h 43m median restoration was already the longest in the top ten. ## Volume or density: which number should you trust? Earlier versions of this page led with raw volume, and our monthly recaps lead with density (events per county). Both are correct; they answer different questions. Here's the reconciliation. **Raw volume answers "where is the most total activity?"** Texas wins every month, and will keep winning, because it has 254 counties and the largest customer base in the country. If you're a national lead-gen operation allocating budget by state, volume is your number. **Density answers "how saturated is a territory I could actually work?"** An installer doesn't sell to a state; they sell to two or three counties. Divide May's events by each state's county count and the ranking inverts: | Density rank | State | Events per county (May 2026) | |---|---|---| | 1 | Massachusetts | 735 | | 2 | New Jersey | 725 | | 3 | District of Columbia | 619 | | 4 | Connecticut | 509 | | 5 | California | 493 | | 6 | Maryland | 446 | | 7 | Pennsylvania | 409 | | 8 | Texas | 366 | Massachusetts and New Jersey roughly double Texas per county. Every one of New Jersey's 21 counties and Massachusetts's 14 counties logged outages in May. There is no quiet corner. For a two-county installer in Bergen or Middlesex, the grid hands you fresh canvassing material weekly, which is the core decision input in [picking a sales territory](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/). The same logic continues all the way down to the door: density at the ZIP level beats density at the county level, which is [why ZIP-level outage data beats county-level](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/), and why the street beats them both. ## The full 50-state table: May 2026 **Window:** May 1–31, 2026. **Source:** GridProfile analysis of DOE ODIN plus direct collection from 70+ utility and 90+ cooperative outage feeds. **Customers hit** sums the utility-reported customer count per event over the month. **Unexplained** is the share of events for which the reporting utility published no cause. **Median duration** uses only events with verified start and end timestamps; see the notes below the table. | # | State | Events | Customers hit | Counties hit | Events / county | Unexplained | Median duration | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Texas | 93,084 | 3,000,844 | 225/254 | 366 | 86% | 2h 06m | | 2 | California | 28,619 | 3,030,073 | 57/58 | 493 | 68% | 3h 23m | | 3 | Pennsylvania | 27,389 | 1,407,025 | 67/67 | 409 | 66% | 1h 27m | | 4 | Ohio | 22,436 | 850,631 | 88/88 | 255 | 84% | 2h 15m | | 5 | New York | 22,235 | 1,006,094 | 61/62 | 359 | 96% | 2h 44m | | 6 | Georgia | 20,592 | 627,590 | 153/159 | 130 | 99% | 1h 38m | | 7 | Alabama | 19,641 | 434,256 | 59/67 | 293 | 100% | 1h 17m | | 8 | Louisiana | 18,930 | 538,276 | 61/64 | 296 | 98% | 1h 53m | | 9 | North Carolina | 18,681 | 460,961 | 100/100 | 187 | 66% | 3h 22m | | 10 | Florida | 16,298 | 542,919 | 45/67 | 243 | 82% | 4h 43m | | 11 | New Jersey | 15,226 | 742,583 | 21/21 | 725 | 83% | 2h 24m | | 12 | Missouri | 14,771 | 432,154 | 91/115 | 128 | 88% | 2h 42m | | 13 | Virginia | 14,730 | 601,565 | 125/133 | 111 | 80% | 1h 58m | | 14 | Michigan | 14,526 | 527,564 | 71/83 | 175 | 38% | 2h 09m | | 15 | Kansas | 13,809 | 438,452 | 93/105 | 132 | 95% | 5h 40m | | 16 | Illinois | 13,692 | 352,006 | 99/102 | 134 | 81% | 1h 52m | | 17 | Maryland | 10,705 | 328,718 | 15/24 | 446 | 82% | 2h 54m | | 18 | Massachusetts | 10,294 | 646,724 | 14/14 | 735 | 98% | 2h 04m | | 19 | Arkansas | 9,930 | 179,851 | 73/75 | 132 | 97% | 1h 38m | | 20 | West Virginia | 9,711 | 470,825 | 55/55 | 177 | 79% | 2h 08m | | 21 | Oklahoma | 9,594 | 195,490 | 72/77 | 125 | 87% | 1h 41m | | 22 | Mississippi | 9,346 | 199,407 | 63/82 | 114 | 100% | 2h 02m | | 23 | Washington | 9,239 | 536,657 | 33/39 | 237 | 51% | 4h 24m | | 24 | Tennessee | 8,092 | 226,402 | 66/95 | 85 | 92% | 1h 25m | | 25 | Oregon | 7,916 | 248,859 | 29/36 | 220 | 82% | 8h 01m | | 26 | Utah | 7,184 | 243,841 | 26/29 | 248 | 82% | 5h 36m | | 27 | Iowa | 6,119 | 185,721 | 70/99 | 62 | 85% | 5h 52m | | 28 | South Carolina | 6,083 | 173,593 | 33/46 | 132 | 74% | 2h 59m | | 29 | Indiana | 5,810 | 162,550 | 81/92 | 63 | 77% | 2h 53m | | 30 | Connecticut | 4,582 | 204,322 | 10/9* | 509 | 82% | 2h 15m | | 31 | Kentucky | 4,569 | 99,020 | 53/120 | 38 | 87% | 1h 47m | | 32 | Minnesota | 3,227 | 91,172 | 68/87 | 37 | 95% | 2h 43m | | 33 | New Hampshire | 3,169 | 143,582 | 10/10 | 317 | 77% | 1h 46m | | 34 | Idaho | 2,546 | 89,314 | 23/44 | 58 | 78% | 2h 37m | | 35 | New Mexico | 2,503 | 106,238 | 26/33 | 76 | 86% | 1h 28m | | 36 | Colorado | 1,949 | 73,237 | 39/64 | 30 | 94% | 1h 33m | | 37 | Wyoming | 1,871 | 53,650 | 20/23 | 81 | 87% | 3h 26m | | 38 | Maine | 1,706 | 135,164 | 16/16 | 107 | 90% | n/a | | 39 | Nevada | 1,410 | 71,641 | 15/17 | 83 | 80% | 8h 55m | | 40 | Wisconsin | 1,235 | 10,460 | 41/72 | 17 | 97% | 2h 01m | | 41 | Arizona | 744 | 91,663 | 12/15 | 50 | 86% | 2h 17m | | 42 | Nebraska | 734 | 9,015 | 17/93 | 8 | 100% | 2h 36m | | 43 | District of Columbia | 619 | 25,010 | 1/1 | 619 | 88% | n/a | | 44 | Vermont | 322 | 11,032 | 11/14 | 23 | 98% | 1h 34m | | 45 | South Dakota | 304 | 4,468 | 18/66 | 5 | 89% | 2h 35m | | 46 | Delaware | 136 | 7,052 | 3/3 | 45 | 100% | n/a | | 47 | Montana | 61 | 4,153 | 8/56 | 1 | 100% | n/a | | 48 | Hawaii | 55 | 20,991 | 2/5 | 11 | 100% | 4h 31m | | 49 | North Dakota | 47 | 1,540 | 3/53 | 1 | 94% | 1h 51m | | 50 | Rhode Island | 10 | 15 | 1/5 | 2 | 100% | 1h 43m | \* Connecticut replaced its eight counties with nine planning regions in 2022; event records still carry legacy county codes, so the hit/total ratio reads oddly. Treat its density figure as approximate. ## How to read the table: three honest caveats **1. The bottom of the table is partly a coverage artifact.** Rhode Island did not have ten times fewer outages than Vermont in any meaningful sense. Our direct-feed coverage in the smallest states is thinner, and some utilities there report only through the federal county-level feed. States below roughly #40 are under-counted. Everything above the top-30 line is well-covered and comparable. We'd rather show you the seam in the data than hide it. **2. "Unexplained" measures the utility, not the grid.** Alabama, Mississippi, Nebraska, Delaware, and Montana show 100% unexplained because their dominant utilities publish no cause on any public feed: Alabama Power and Mississippi Power (both Southern Company) explain exactly nothing, ever. Michigan's 38% is the best in the country because DTE and Consumers Energy label most events. The national picture ([why utilities don't explain outages](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/)) deserves its own post, and has one. When a cause *is* published, [equipment failure beats weather roughly 3.5-to-1](/insights/what-causes-us-power-outages/). **3. Median duration only counts events we can verify end-to-end.** Some feeds (Maine, DC, Delaware, Montana among them) publish restoration snapshots without a real start time. We exclude those events from duration math entirely rather than guess, which is why a few states show "n/a". The medians you do see are computed only from events with verified start and end timestamps. ## Which states keep customers in the dark longest? Restoration time is the most under-used column in this table, and for generator and battery sales it's the most important one. - **Nevada: 8h 55m median.** Rural co-op territory drags the figure up; an outage outside Las Vegas is an all-day event. - **Oregon: 8h 01m.** The longest median of any state with meaningful volume (7,916 events). Long feeder runs through forest, small crews, big distances. - **Iowa (5h 52m), Kansas (5h 40m), Utah (5h 36m).** The quiet middle of the country restores slowly. Kansas pairs its long restorations with real volume (13,809 events), making it one of the most under-rated generator territories in the country. - **Florida: 4h 43m.** The longest median in the top-10 by volume, *before* hurricane season. - At the other end: **Alabama (1h 17m), Pennsylvania (1h 27m), Tennessee (1h 25m)** restore fast. Frequent-but-short outage territory sells differently: it's annoyance, not survival, and the pitch is whole-home battery comfort rather than generator necessity. A two-hour median with high frequency (New Jersey, Massachusetts) is a *battery* conversation. An eight-hour median with moderate frequency (Oregon, Nevada, rural Kansas) is a *generator* conversation. We mapped [which territories fit generators versus batteries](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/) on exactly this split. ## What does this mean for installers? Four territory archetypes fall out of the table: **The volume belt: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia.** Enormous event counts, fast-ish restorations, near-total cause silence. The play here is freshness at the door: with this much weekly activity, every canvassing route can lead with an outage from the last seven days. Harris County alone logged 17,743 events in May (calendar-month count), more than 40 entire states. The catch: these are also the states where the utility tells homeowners nothing, so the rep who shows up knowing *when the street lost power and for how long* is the best-informed person in the conversation. **The density corridor: New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland.** Every county active, 400–735 events per county, moderate durations, high electricity rates. Small-territory installers get the most per door here: tight ZIPs, dense single-family streets, and a grid that reliably refreshes the pitch. These four states plus DC are the strongest *battery* markets in the table. **The slow-restoration interior: Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia.** Mid-table volume that nobody talks about, with restorations running 2.5 to 6 hours. Less installer competition than either coast. West Virginia is the sleeper: 9,711 events across all 55 counties and 470K customers hit, in a state with under 800K households. **The West Coast: California, Washington, Oregon.** Big events (note customers-hit relative to event count), long restorations, and the best cause transparency outside Michigan. California's 3.0M customers hit matched Texas with a third of the events. Washington's 51% unexplained rate is half the national norm, which makes utility-specific targeting workable. Oregon's 8-hour median restoration is the single strongest generator-demand signal in the table. ## What data should installers actually pull for a territory decision? The state table tells you where to look; it can't pick your counties. When you pull a GridProfile report for a specific territory, four numbers matter most: 1. **Recent events per ZIP**, not the state average. The specific ZIPs in your service area with disturbances in the last 7–30 days. We walk through [how to pick a solar territory using this data](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/). 2. **Restoration hours in your counties**: the generator-versus-battery split above, applied locally. County medians often differ from the state median by 2x in either direction. 3. **Single-family home %**: a ZIP with 90% single-family homes and recent grid events beats one dominated by apartments. This comes from Census ACS, joined to every ZIP we report. 4. **Electricity rate trend**: rising rates make the solar math easier at the door. EIA publishes them; we attach them. And below the ZIP sits the street: the named blocks that actually went dark, with house-number ranges, the level [no public source publishes](/insights/power-outages-by-street/). For the full picture of [how installers use outage data for leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/), and how it compares to buying them, see the lead-gen guide. ## Where does this data come from? Every input is a government or utility dataset: **DOE ODIN** (the federal real-time feed), direct collection from the public outage maps of **70+ utilities and 90+ electric cooperatives**, **Census ACS** demographics, **EIA** electricity rates, and **DSIRE** incentives. All public. None of them talk to each other. GridProfile polls the feeds around the clock, deduplicates overlapping reports of the same event, flags records with unverifiable timestamps (and excludes them from duration math, as above), and joins the result to ZIPs and streets. The numbers on this page are the calendar-May 2026 cut of that database; the [monthly recap](/insights/power-outages-may-2026/) and the [12-month county leaderboard](/insights/top-counties-grid-event-days/) are other cuts of the same pipeline. If you want this table resolved down to your own territory, [grab a free grid profile](/): pick your state and up to three counties, and we'll email you the ZIP-level breakdown with the streets that lost power most recently. --- ## Power outage data for March 2026 Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/power-outage-data-march-2026/ Over **210,000 power outage events** hit **46 states** in the last 30 days. That's roughly 7,000 grid disturbances a day spread across more than 2,000 counties. We looked at [seasonal patterns and what's driving these numbers](/insights/are-power-outages-getting-worse/) in a separate post, and pulled the [April 2026 follow-up with hot ZIP codes](/insights/power-outages-april-2026/) once the next month's data was in. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, these are the numbers that decide which counties earned a crew in April. ## Which states had the most outage events in March 2026? **Texas** led with **31,919 events** across 213 counties. Harris County alone had 4,799, more than most entire states. Dallas (2,354), Tarrant (2,061), and Montgomery (1,622) rounded out the list. Three or more utilities reported overlapping outages in Harris and Montgomery counties, which means these weren't isolated incidents. **California** came in second at **19,777 events** but hit far more customers: nearly **1.5 million** affected. Los Angeles County averaged 134 customers per event, and single events knocked out over 5,800 customers at once. We have a [full California county-by-county breakdown](/insights/california-power-outage-data/) with cause data and demographics. **Ohio** logged **13,335 events** across 84 counties. Franklin County (Columbus metro) had 2,529 on its own. **Louisiana** posted **10,433 events** across all 60 parishes, continuing a pattern we covered in our [state-by-state grid breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/). That's 174 events per parish, almost six per day. ## Which states have the worst grid reliability per county? Raw event counts favor big states. Events per county tells you where the grid is actually under stress. **New Jersey** had the highest density at **383 events per county** across all 21 counties. That's nearly 13 per county per day. California was close behind at 341, Maryland at 336. For solar territory planning, density matters more than volume. A state with 8,000 events spread across 21 counties is a different market than one with 32,000 events spread across 213. New Jersey's grid was under pressure everywhere. Texas had hot spots surrounded by quieter counties. ## What caused power outages in March 2026? The most common cause category is **unknown**: over 40,000 events where utilities reported some variant of "under investigation" or "pending." We dug into [why so many outages go unexplained](/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/) and which utilities are the worst offenders. After unknowns and scheduled maintenance, **equipment failure** is the leading identified cause. Equipment-related outages averaged **9.2 hours** to restore and affected an average of 89 customers per event. Proactive equipment upgrades averaged 8.3 hours and impacted 113 customers per event, accounting for over **300,000** total customers affected. **Vegetation contact** (tree limbs on lines) averaged **6 hours** per event. Not the most frequent cause, but consistently one of the longest to fix. Animals, balloons, and vehicles account for a smaller but steady share of events. We dug into the [strangest outage causes in the data](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/). ## How long did power outages last by state? **Nebraska** was the slowest at **10.6 hours** average, with a 90th-percentile time of 17.1 hours. One in ten Nebraska outages lasted more than 17 hours. **Oregon** averaged 7.6 hours. **Utah** averaged 6.0. **California**, despite the highest customer impact, averaged 5.2 hours but had a 90th-percentile of **12.1 hours**, a long tail of extended outages pulling the average up. The fastest states restored in under 3 hours on average. The gap between a 3-hour average and a 10-hour average is the gap between an inconvenience and a homeowner searching "whole home battery" on their phone. ## Where should solar installers prospect based on March 2026 data? Three markets stand out for Q2 territory planning (we break down [how to pick a solar territory](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/) in more detail): 1. **Texas metro counties** (Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Montgomery) had the raw volume to fill a pipeline. Multiple utilities reporting means multiple customer bases getting hit. 2. **New Jersey and Maryland** had the highest density. Every county in both states averaged more than 10 events per day. Smaller territory, but every county got hit. 3. **California** had the most customers affected per event. Fewer events than Texas, but each one hit harder. At **36.2 cents per kWh**, the highest rate in the dataset, the payback period on a solar install shrinks fast. Counties with high event counts, long restoration times, and high electricity rates are where outage frustration converts fastest. We cover [how installers use outage data for leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/), and how it stacks up against buying them, in the lead-gen guide. [Grab a free grid profile](/) to see the ZIP-level breakdown for your counties: which neighborhoods had events last week, how long they lasted, and what percentage of homes are owner-occupied single-family. --- ## Pitching solar after a power outage Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/ A homeowner who lost power for 10 hours last Tuesday doesn't need you to explain why grid reliability matters. They already know. The pitch after an outage is different from a cold knock: shorter, more concrete, and built around a problem they just lived through. This playbook is for solar, battery, and generator reps working recently-hit streets. Before the pitch comes the knock. We ranked [the best door-to-door openers](/insights/best-door-to-door-sales-openers/) separately. The fresh-outage line wins. ## How do I pitch solar after a power outage? Lead with what happened to them, not what you sell. Pull up the outage data for their ZIP before you knock. If their neighborhood had a **6-hour outage on Tuesday** caused by equipment failure, say that. "I saw your area lost power for six hours last week. That's the third time this quarter" is a conversation starter. "Would you like to learn about solar energy?" is a door closing in your face. The pitch has three parts: 1. **Name the problem with their data.** "Your county had 4,799 outage events last month. Your ZIP had power out three times in 30 days." Specific numbers from [your territory's grid profile](/) beat vague claims about an aging grid. Our [state-by-state grid breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/) shows which states break most often and why. 2. **Show the solution is permanent.** Solar panels alone don't keep the lights on during an outage. You need a battery. Make sure the homeowner knows you're talking about solar plus storage, not just panels on the roof. 3. **Make the math local.** At **36.2 cents per kWh** in California or **27.6 cents** in New Jersey, the payback period is shorter than most homeowners expect. Pull the rate for their utility, not a national average. The timing matters. Knock within **7 days** of an outage event. After two weeks, the frustration fades and they're back to thinking "it probably won't happen again." ## What do homeowners care about after a power outage? They care about three things, and none of them is their carbon footprint. **Keeping the lights and fridge running** is first. A family that threw out $400 in groceries after a 12-hour outage remembers that number. **Not being helpless next time** is second: the feeling of sitting in the dark waiting for a utility truck is what drives action. **Cost** is third, but only after the first two land. States with the longest restoration times produce the most motivated buyers. **New York** averages **27 hours** to restore power. **Nebraska** averages **10.6 hours**. **Oregon** averages **7.6 hours**. We broke down [restoration times by state](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/) in our territory planning guide. The longer the outage lasted, the more time the homeowner had to think about alternatives. Counties where outages happen almost daily are even stronger. **Pierce County, Washington** had outages on **24 of the last 30 days**. That's not a one-time event. It's a pattern. Homeowners in chronic-outage counties don't need convincing that the grid is unreliable. They need someone to show up with a solution. Don't lead with environmental benefits or energy independence as abstract concepts. Lead with "your power went out, here's how to make sure it doesn't happen again, and here's what it costs." ## Is solar + battery a good pitch for grid reliability? Yes. It's the only residential option that both eliminates the electric bill and keeps the house running during an outage. A generator does one of those things. Solar without a battery does the other. Solar plus storage does both. The pitch works best in counties where outages are **frequent but not catastrophic**. A neighborhood that loses power for 4-8 hours every few weeks is a better battery market than one that had a single 48-hour outage from a hurricane. Frequent outages create ongoing frustration. One-off disasters create insurance claims. Back it with numbers from the homeowner's own area. If their county had **equipment failure** as the top cause, which is the [leading identified cause nationally](/insights/power-outage-data-march-2026/), that means aging infrastructure, not a freak storm. Equipment doesn't get younger. The outages will keep coming. Battery sizing matters at the door. Most homeowners don't realize a standard solar battery can keep their fridge, lights, Wi-Fi, and a few outlets running for 8-12 hours. That covers the vast majority of outages. You're not selling a whole-home generator replacement. You're selling "your kitchen stays on while the neighbors sit in the dark." ## How do I compete with generator companies for outage leads? Generators win on upfront cost and simplicity. A whole-home standby generator runs **$5,000-$15,000** installed. Solar plus battery starts around **$25,000-$40,000** before incentives. If the homeowner is only thinking about backup power, the generator looks like an obvious choice. You win on total cost of ownership and the monthly bill. A generator sits in the yard burning natural gas or propane every time it runs. Solar plus battery eliminates or reduces the electric bill every month, outage or not. Over 10 years, the generator costs more. The homeowner still pays their full electric bill on top of it. Three angles that work against generators: 1. **"What happens between outages?"** A generator does nothing 99% of the time. Solar panels reduce or eliminate the electric bill every day. At **36.2 cents/kWh** in California, that's real money every month. 2. **"Generators need maintenance."** Oil changes, fuel storage, annual servicing. A battery has no moving parts. Solar panels last 25 years with essentially zero maintenance. 3. **"Incentives close the gap."** The federal tax credit covers 30% of solar plus battery. Most states have additional rebates. After incentives, the price gap between a generator and solar-plus-storage shrinks fast. A generator has no federal tax credit. Don't trash generators. Some homeowners want both: a generator for extended outages and solar for daily savings. But if they're choosing one, make the 10-year math clear. ## What data should I bring to a solar pitch? Bring three things, all specific to the homeowner's ZIP code. Generic state-level stats don't land at the door. 1. **Recent outage events in their ZIP.** Not the county average: the actual events in their neighborhood from the last 7-30 days. "Your ZIP had power out on March 3rd, March 11th, and March 22nd" is specific enough to get a reaction. You can pull this from a [free grid profile](/). 2. **Their electricity rate.** Look up the residential rate for their utility on the EIA website, or pull it from a GridProfile report. The difference between quoting "the national average" and quoting "your rate of 27.6 cents per kilowatt-hour" is the difference between a brochure and a conversation. 3. **Outage cause and duration.** If their area's outages are caused by [aging equipment or vegetation contact](/insights/power-outage-data-march-2026/), that's a recurring problem, not a one-time event. If their average restoration time is 6+ hours, say so. "Your area averages 7 hours without power per outage" gives the homeowner a reason to act now. Skip the 30-page proposal at the door. You're not closing on the first visit. You're getting a sit-down appointment. The data gets you in the door. The full proposal happens at the kitchen table. Counties with a mix of cause types (equipment failure, [animal contact, vehicle strikes](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/)) are places where the grid fails in multiple ways. That's a stronger pitch than a county where all outages come from one seasonal cause. One cause might get fixed. Five causes mean the infrastructure needs replacing. The outage pitch is one channel among several. Our [guide to getting solar leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/) compares it to bought leads, referrals, and ads, with the cost math for each. If you want the ZIP-level breakdown for your territory, [grab a free grid profile](/): pick your state and counties and we'll send you the outage events, causes, restoration times, and demographics for every ZIP. --- ## How to pick a solar sales territory Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/ **New Jersey** averages **393 outage events per county** per month. Texas averages **154**. If you're choosing between the two for a solar territory, the raw event count says Texas. The density says New Jersey. That difference decides whether you're driving 40 minutes between appointments or knocking five doors on the same block. If you run a solar sales team, the best territories have three things: a grid that breaks often, homes that can go solar, and electricity rates that make the math easy. (The same logic works for battery and generator crews.) ## Which states have the best solar sales territories right now? The best territories have high outage density, high single-family home rates, and high electricity prices. Based on the last 30 days of grid data, five states score well on all three: - **New Jersey**: **393 events per county**, the highest density in the country. **27.6 cents/kWh** in Atlantic and Cape May counties. Gloucester County has **76.5% owner-occupancy**. Every county in the state had outages every day of the month. - **California**: **353 events per county** with **36.2 cents/kWh** residential rates, the highest in the dataset. Contra Costa County hit **791 events** in 90 days with **65.7% owner-occupancy** and a **$866,800** median home value. High rates mean short payback periods. - **Maryland**: **348 events per county** across just 15 counties. Baltimore County had outages on **23 of the last 30 days**. At **4.6 hours average restoration**, these aren't quick flickers. - **Massachusetts**: **203 events per county**. Essex County logged outages on **23 of 30 days** with events hitting up to **1,731 customers** at once. - **Utah**: **189 events per county**. Salt Lake County had **1,779 events** in 30 days. Davis County had outages on **23 of 30 days**. The state averaged **6.0 hours** to restore power, double the national median. Texas has the most total events (**32,811**) but they're spread across **213 counties**. That's a huge state with pockets of activity, not wall-to-wall grid stress. If you're in Texas, you need to drill into the right counties. ## Which counties should solar installers target? The top 10 counties by outage events in the last 30 days: 1. **Harris County, TX**: 4,997 events, 3 utilities reporting, max single event hit 6,967 customers 2. **Cook County, IL**: 2,741 events 3. **Franklin County, OH**: 2,562 events, 3 utilities reporting 4. **Dallas County, TX**: 2,420 events 5. **Tarrant County, TX**: 2,115 events 6. **Los Angeles County, CA**: 1,964 events, averaging 131 customers per event 7. **Salt Lake County, UT**: 1,779 events 8. **Montgomery County, TX**: 1,667 events, 3 utilities reporting 9. **Jefferson County, AL**: 1,633 events 10. **Jackson County, MO**: 1,593 events Raw event counts are the starting point, not the whole picture. Harris County has the most events, but it also has 4.7 million people. What matters for territory planning is whether those events are hitting neighborhoods where you can actually sell solar. Cross-reference with **single-family home density** and **owner-occupancy rates**. A county with 2,000 outage events and 70% single-family homes is a better door-knocking territory than one with 5,000 events and 30% apartments. We covered how density changes the picture in our [state-by-state grid breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/). ## How do I find the right ZIP codes to canvass? County-level data gets you to the right metro. ZIP-level data gets you to the right streets. We made the longer case for [outages by ZIP, not county](/insights/power-outages-by-zip-vs-county/) in a separate post. The three numbers that matter at the ZIP level: 1. **Recent grid events**: ZIPs with events in the last 7 days are where homeowners are thinking about their power right now. Not last month, not last year. This week. 2. **Single-family home %**: From Census table B25024. A ZIP at 85% single-family homes is almost all rooftops you can put panels on. A ZIP at 40% is mostly apartments and condos. 3. **Owner-occupancy %**: Renters don't buy solar. A ZIP with high outage activity but low ownership is a dead end for residential installs. Sort by recent events first, then filter for ZIPs above 60% single-family and 50% owner-occupied. What's left is your knock list. ## How long do power outages last, and why does it matter for solar sales? Longer outages mean more motivated homeowners. The states with the longest average restoration times in the last 90 days: - **New York**: **27.0 hours** average. One in ten outages lasted more than **7.7 hours**. - **Nebraska**: **10.0 hours** average, with a 90th-percentile of **14.4 hours**. - **Oregon**: **7.6 hours** average, 90th-percentile at **11.9 hours**. - **Utah**: **6.0 hours** average, 90th-percentile at **10.4 hours**. - **California**: **5.2 hours** average, but a 90th-percentile of **12.1 hours**. The long tail of extended outages is where the frustration lives. A 2-hour outage is an inconvenience. A 10-hour outage is a homeowner googling "solar battery backup" on their phone. If you're choosing between two counties with similar event counts, pick the one with longer restoration times. Those homeowners have had more time to think about alternatives. Counties with chronic outages are even better signals. **Pierce County, Washington** had outages on **24 of the last 30 days**. King County had them on **23 days**. Kern County, California: **23 days**. These aren't places where the power went out once. These are places where it goes out every other day. That's a conversation starter that doesn't need a script. ## What makes outage data better than buying solar leads? A purchased lead is a name and phone number, sold to multiple installers, from a form someone filled out weeks ago. By the time you call, they've heard from a dozen competitors or moved on entirely. (Our [guide to getting solar leads](/insights/how-to-get-solar-leads/) compares every channel: bought, self-generated, and outage-triggered.) Outage data works differently. It tells you *where* demand exists right now, not who expressed interest in the past. A ZIP that lost power on Tuesday has homeowners thinking about reliability on Wednesday. You're not competing with 11 other installers calling the same list. You're the one installer who showed up in the right neighborhood at the right time because you had the right data. The same data works for battery storage and generator sales. A county with frequent short outages (under 4 hours) is a good battery market. A county with infrequent but long outages (8+ hours) is a generator market. We break down [which territories fit generators vs. batteries](/insights/generator-battery-demand-by-territory/) in a separate post. And when you're at the door, knowing [how to pitch solar after an outage](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/) makes the data actionable. The [causes behind the outages](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/) tell you even more about infrastructure age and vulnerability. [Grab a free grid profile](/) to see the ZIP-level breakdown for your counties, ranked by recent grid events, single-family home density, and electricity rates. --- ## Weird things that cause outages Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/ A squirrel in Kentucky knocked out **806 customers** in a single event. A hawk in Grayson County caught the top of a utility pole on fire. In Los Angeles, four metallic balloons drifted into power lines in a single weekend, cutting power to over **900 homes** combined. These aren't hypotheticals. They're real cause descriptions from utility outage reports filed in the last year. And they show up in the data more often than you'd expect. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, the weird causes are more than trivia: they mark the grids that fail for any reason at all. ## How often do animals cause power outages? **747 animal-caused outage events** hit the grid in the last 12 months, affecting over **24,000 customers**. Squirrels are the headliner, but the full cast includes birds, raccoons, snakes, and whatever "wildlife" covers when a utility doesn't want to be more specific. Multnomah County, Oregon leads the country with **52 animal-caused events**. Converse County, Wyoming logged **42**. Salt Lake County, Utah had **26**, affecting **854 customers**. The average animal outage lasts about 3-4 hours to fix. But outliers exist. One squirrel event in the data shows an average duration of **354 hours** across 6 incidents in a single county, which likely reflects cascading equipment damage rather than a single chewed wire. ## Can a balloon cause a power outage? Yes, and it happens regularly. Los Angeles County had **four balloon-caused outages in one weekend** in March 2026, each knocking out 230-265 customers. The cause shows up in utility reports as "Metallic Balloons in Equipment." Balloons are part of a broader category: foreign objects in equipment. In the first two weeks of April alone, Butte County, California lost power for **3,034 customers** from a foreign object. San Bernardino County had a **2,064-customer** event from the same cause. These aren't minor blips. "Foreign Object Blown By Wind" is its own category. Three events logged under that label averaged **52 customers** each, with one hitting **153**. ## How many outages are caused by vehicle accidents? **620 vehicle-related outages** in the last year, affecting over **42,000 customers**. Average restoration time: **7 hours**. A car into a pole doesn't just take out a transformer. It often snaps the pole itself, which means a full replacement before power comes back. The biggest single vehicle event: **3,816 customers** out in Linn County, Oregon, lasting **10.7 hours**. Snohomish County, Washington had one that knocked out **2,899 customers** for nearly **12 hours**. These are small-city-scale outages caused by one driver and one pole. Traffic accidents that hit utility infrastructure average **15.8 hours** to restore, more than double the overall vehicle average. When a utility pole goes down on a busy road, traffic control and road crews have to coordinate with line crews before anyone can start pulling wire. ## Do utility poles catch fire? More than you'd think. **34 pole fire events** in the last year, mostly in California and the western states. Average restoration: **7-9 hours**. PG&E reported pole fires in Solano, Kern, Merced, Fresno, and Kings counties in a single week in late March. The Solano County event lasted **13.2 hours** and hit **360 customers**. Kern County had two events on the same day. The Grayson County, Kentucky event is the best single-line cause description in the entire dataset: "Crew on site, hawk caught top of pole on fire. Able to downgrade." A hawk landed on a pole, shorted the equipment, and set the pole on fire. **36 customers** lost power. Pole fires turn out to be a bigger pattern than a one-off hawk. We dug into [where pole fires cluster and why they cause such long outages](/insights/pole-fire-power-outages/): 137 of them in 75 days, averaging over 12 hours to restore. ## What happens when someone digs into a power line? Construction crews hitting underground cables is common enough to have its own cause code. "Dig Into Underground Service" appears **8 times** in recent data, with one event in San Bernardino County taking out **830 customers**. The irony: every state has a 811 "call before you dig" law. The outages still happen. ## What do unusual outage causes tell you about a territory? The causes above account for a small share of total outage volume. Equipment failure and vegetation are still the big two, as we covered in our [breakdown of what actually causes US power outages](/insights/what-causes-us-power-outages/). But the weird causes are useful signals for a different reason. A county where animals, balloons, and vehicles regularly cause outages is a county where the grid runs close to the edge. One squirrel shouldn't take out 800 homes. When it does, that's [aging equipment with no redundancy](/insights/are-power-outages-getting-worse/). The same homeowners who lost power to a balloon are the ones most likely to say yes to a [solar and battery pitch](/insights/pitching-solar-after-power-outage/). If you're prospecting in counties with high event counts from [our state-by-state breakdown](/insights/grid-reliability-by-state/), check what's causing the outages. A county with a mix of animal, vehicle, and equipment failures has infrastructure that fails in multiple ways. That's a territory where "what happens when the grid goes down" isn't a hypothetical. It happened last week, and it might have been a squirrel. [Grab a free grid profile](/) to see which ZIPs in your territory had outages this week, what caused them, and how long they lasted. --- ## Why utilities don't explain outages Published: 2026-04-10 | Updated: 2026-06-11 | Canonical: https://gridprofile.com/insights/why-utilities-dont-explain-outages/ **Cuyahoga County, Ohio** lost power for **51,958 customers** on March 30, 2026. The cause listed in the public utility data: nothing. No explanation. No category. No follow-up. That's not unusual. In the last 30 days, **83% of all outage events** across the U.S. had no identified cause. Out of **223,694 total events**, **185,496** were filed as some version of "unknown," "under investigation," "pending," or simply left blank. The gap between what utilities know and what they tell the public is one of the largest blind spots in U.S. energy data. If you run a solar, battery, or generator sales team, that blind spot works in your favor: the homeowner knows the lights went out, and nobody ever told them why. ## How many power outages go unexplained? **185,496 out of 223,694 events** in the last 30 days, or **82.9%**, had no identified cause in public reporting. These events affected over **3.5 million customers**. The "unknown" label covers a range of non-answers. **123,250 events** had no cause string at all: the utility reported the outage but provided zero explanation. Another **10,845 events** were labeled "Pending Investigation." **8,688** said "Under Investigation." **7,473** said "Investigating." Over **4,000** were listed as "PATROLLING," which is a crew status, not a cause. Only **38,198 events** in 30 days had an identified cause: equipment failure, vegetation, weather, animals, vehicles, or fire. That's **17% of all events** with an actual explanation. ## Which utilities report outage causes, and which don't? Some utilities publish cause data for most of their outages. **Southern California Edison** reports causes for **88-91%** of events. **Consumers Energy** (Michigan) explains **93.9%** of 1,777 events. **Duke Energy Carolinas** and **Duke Energy Progress** report causes for 40-57% of events. When these utilities say "equipment failure" or "vegetation contact," the data is useful. Other utilities don't publish cause data at all. Their public outage APIs simply don't include a cause field. **Entergy** (Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi) reported **20,520 events** in 30 days with no cause data available. **Georgia Power**: **8,365 events**, no causes. **Alabama Power**: **7,842 events**, no causes. These utilities track outages and show them on their maps, but the public feeds don't include why the power went out. **PG&E** (California) is in between. Its API includes a cause field, but for **12,569 events** affecting **549,753 customers**, the field says things like "PATROLLING" or "EMERG REPAIRS": crew dispatching statuses, not causes. Only a fraction of PG&E's events are classified as equipment failure, vegetation, or weather. ## Do unknown-cause outages ever get explained later? Rarely. Most events filed as "Pending Investigation" or "Under Investigation" stay that way in the public data. Utilities update their internal systems, but the public-facing outage maps and DOE reporting rarely get retroactive cause data. The ODIN system (the DOE's real-time utility reporting feed) shows an **83.3% unknown rate** across all utilities. This isn't a scraper artifact or a data gap. It's how utilities report. Some unknowns are genuinely hard to diagnose. A momentary voltage dip that trips a relay and resets 30 seconds later is hard to trace. But **51,958 customers** losing power in one event in Cuyahoga County isn't a momentary dip. **Ocean County, New Jersey** had an event affecting **7,185 customers** that lasted **15.5 hours** with no cause listed. Erie County, Pennsylvania: **20,836 customers**, **63.8 hours**, no cause. These are multi-day, city-scale outages with no public explanation. ## What does outage cause data actually look like? When utilities do report causes, the data is useful. In the last 30 days across all events with an identified cause: - **Equipment failure** is the top category, by a wide margin. It accounts for [more than 3x the volume of weather causes](/insights/what-causes-us-power-outages/) when utilities do label events. "Equipment Problems" averaged **9.1 hours** to restore, affecting an average of **92 customers** per event. "Upgrading Equipment" (proactive replacements) averaged **8.4 hours** and hit **115 customers** per event. - **Vegetation contact** (trees hitting lines) averaged **6.1 hours** per event. It's the [leading cause of long outages](/insights/are-power-outages-getting-worse/) across most states. - **Vehicles** hitting utility poles averaged **7 hours** per event. **Animals** averaged **4.1 hours**. We covered the [full breakdown of unusual causes](/insights/weird-power-outage-causes/) in a separate post. - **Weather** accounted for 1,232 events at **5.7 hours** average. This is the 17% of events where the data is actually informative. The other 83% is a black box. ## Why does this matter for solar and backup power sales? An unexplained outage is still an outage. The homeowner who sat in the dark for 15 hours doesn't care whether the utility filed a cause report. But the cause data, when it exists, tells you something about whether it'll happen again. Equipment failure is a structural problem. Vegetation contact is seasonal but recurring. An "unknown" outage in a county with aging infrastructure probably has the same root cause as the equipment failures next door. The utility just didn't bother classifying it. For territory planning, the cause gap is actually an opportunity. Counties with high event counts and high unknown rates have utilities that are less transparent about their grid problems. That usually correlates with less investment in prevention. If a utility can't explain why your power went out, it probably can't explain what it's doing to stop it from happening again. That's the conversation a solar installer can have at the door. Counties where [outages happen almost every day](/insights/solar-sales-territory-planning/) are territories worth working regardless of cause. But knowing that 83% of those events go unexplained adds a layer to the pitch: "Your utility can't even tell you why the power went out." [Grab a free grid profile](/) to see which ZIPs in your territory had outages this week, what caused them (when the utility bothered to say), and how long they lasted.