Power outages in Virginia, by utility
Across 13 Virginia utilities that reported to the federal government, the median customer went without power for 6.4 hours in 2025 — that is 2.2× the national median. Virginia ranks #4 of 41 states for outage time, worst first.
- Median utility
- 6.4 hrs
- typical customer
- Worst utility
- 35.5 hrs
- Southside Electric Coop, Inc
- Best utility
- 0.4 hrs
- Bristol Virginia Utilities
- Utilities reporting
- 13
- of 752 nationwide
Every reporting Virginia utility, worst outage time first
| # | Utility | Outage time/yr | Outages/yr | vs US median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Southside Electric Coop, IncCooperative | 35.4 hrs2127 min | 4.4 | 11.9× worse |
| 2 | Appalachian Power CoInvestor Owned | 18.6 hrs1116 min | 2.4 | 6.3× worse |
| 3 | Central Virginia Electric CoopCooperative | 13.3 hrs796 min | 5.0 | 4.5× worse |
| 4 | Mecklenburg Electric CooperativeCooperative | 12 hrs721 min | 2.8 | 4.1× worse |
| 5 | Rappahannock Electric CoopCooperative | 7.1 hrs428 min | 2.5 | 2.4× worse |
| 6 | Shenandoah Valley Elec CoopCooperative | 6.5 hrs391 min | 2.8 | 2.2× worse |
| 7 | Prince George Electric CoopCooperative | 6.4 hrs383 min | — | 2.2× worse |
| 8 | Kentucky Utilities CoInvestor Owned | 5.4 hrs327 min | 1.9 | 1.8× worse |
| 9 | Powell Valley Electric CoopCooperative | 3 hrs180 min | 4.6 | 1.0× worse |
| 10 | Northern Virginia Elec CoopCooperative | 1.6 hrs94 min | 1.0 | 1.9× better |
| 11 | City of Manassas - (VA)Municipal | 1.3 hrs76 min | 1.3 | 2.3× better |
| 12 | City of Salem - (VA)Municipal | 0.5 hrs28 min | 0.3 | 6.5× better |
| 13 | Bristol Virginia UtilitiesMunicipal | 0.4 hrs25 min | 0.2 | 7.0× better |
Outage time is SAIDI: the average minutes a customer went without power across the year, storms and major events included. Outages/yr is SAIFI. The US median across all reporting utilities is 3 hours (178 minutes).
What these numbers do and do not say
SAIDI counts the minutes an average customer spent without power over the year, including storms and other major events. We rank on the figure that includes them, because excluding storms would describe a year nobody actually lived through.
Utilities report these numbers themselves, and smaller co-ops and municipal systems often serve rural territory where a single line fault affects a large share of customers. A high number is not automatically mismanagement — but it is still the power you did not have.
Utilities that filed no reliability data are left out entirely rather than counted as zero.