About When's the Power Back?

An independent US power-outage tracker built around one idea: you should be able to find your location and get the most specific, honest answer available about whether the power is out and when it's likely back — for free.

When's the Power Back? editorial · last reviewed 2026-07-13

What we do

Enter a ZIP, address, or share your location, and we combine two layers of public data:

A free national baseline for every US location — county-level outage counts from the U.S. Department of Energy / Oak Ridge National Laboratory ODIN feed, plus active weather alerts from the National Weather Service.
Deeper, live detail where a utility publishes it — for hundreds of individual electric utilities we read their own public outage feeds directly, so you see city- and neighborhood-level counts and the utility's posted restoration time.

On top of that, we compute an independent restoration estimate from each outage's actual recovery trend — and we show it even before your utility posts an official time.

Who publishes this

When's the Power Back? is an independent project, not a utility, government agency, or reseller of a commercial outage database. Articles and guides are published under organizational authorship ("When's the Power Back? editorial") with a visible reviewed date — we don't invent fake author personas. It's operated by a small independent team; for anything you'd normally email an author about, use the contact page.

Editorial standards

Every number traces to a public source. Outage counts are the utilities' and ODIN's own reported figures; we don't estimate customers-out. Where our fused display figure differs from the raw county baseline, we say so on the page.
Guides cite named authorities. Our safety and preparedness guides attribute every factual claim to a named public authority — USDA/FDA, CPSC, Ready.gov, the American Red Cross, HHS — with a link, and give no medical or legal advice beyond citing them.
We grade our own estimates in public. Every restoration estimate we publish is later scored against when power actually came back. The full, unedited track record — including the misses — is on our accuracy page. We also grade the utilities' own posted restoration times by the same yardstick.
News is human-reviewed before it publishes. Major outages are drafted automatically from the live data, but nothing appears in our newsroom until a person reviews and publishes it. Every sentence in an article is derivable from the feeds we already show — no fabricated quotes.
Corrections. If a number or claim is wrong, tell us via the contact page and we'll fix it and note the change.

How the data works — in the open

We document every source and how often it refreshes on the sources & methodology page, and how the restoration estimates are computed and graded on the accuracy page. Live status refreshes about every 15 minutes; utility-level detail updates more often during active outages. Coverage varies by utility participation — missing data is not the same as zero outages, and we label it that way.

Privacy

The site is built to answer your question without tracking you: no accounts, no login, and no personal data stored to use the map. Our own analytics are cookieless and aggregate. We run Google Analytics on public pages for audience measurement (Google Signals is off, and ?notrack=1 opts you out entirely) — that and our full data posture are described on the sources page.

In an emergency, don't rely on any tracker: a downed line, fire, or medical need is a call to 911 and to your utility's outage line. When's the Power Back? reports conditions — it does not dispatch crews.

Questions, corrections, or coverage requests? See the contact page.