Power outages in North Dakota, by utility
Across 10 North Dakota utilities that reported to the federal government, the median customer went without power for 1.9 hours in 2025 — that is 1.6× better than the national median. North Dakota ranks #33 of 41 states for outage time, worst first.
- Median utility
- 1.9 hrs
- typical customer
- Worst utility
- 9.6 hrs
- Otter Tail Power Co
- Best utility
- 0.7 hrs
- Verendrye Electric Coop Inc
- Utilities reporting
- 10
- of 752 nationwide
Every reporting North Dakota utility, worst outage time first
| # | Utility | Outage time/yr | Outages/yr | vs US median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Otter Tail Power CoInvestor Owned | 9.6 hrs575 min | 2.0 | 3.2× worse |
| 2 | Northern Plains Electric CoopCooperative | 6.2 hrs371 min | 1.4 | 2.1× worse |
| 3 | Nodak Electric Coop IncCooperative | 5.4 hrs321 min | 5.4 | 1.8× worse |
| 4 | Cass County Elec Coop IncCooperative | 5 hrs300 min | 0.8 | 1.7× worse |
| 5 | Mountrail-Williams Elec CoopCooperative | 1.9 hrs116 min | 1.2 | 1.5× better |
| 6 | McKenzie Electric Coop IncCooperative | 1.8 hrs111 min | 0.9 | 1.6× better |
| 7 | Montana-Dakota Utilities CoInvestor Owned | 1.6 hrs95 min | 0.8 | 1.9× better |
| 8 | Northern States Power Co - MinnesotaInvestor Owned | 1.5 hrs88 min | 0.6 | 2.0× better |
| 9 | Dakota Valley Elec Coop IncCooperative | 1.1 hrs64 min | 0.3 | 2.8× better |
| 10 | Verendrye Electric Coop IncCooperative | 0.7 hrs42 min | 0.7 | 4.3× 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.