How often do utilities push back their restoration times?

A living analysis, recomputed continuously from our public accuracy ledger. Numbers below update as events complete — the figures you see are current, not a snapshot from publication day.

What we found

When a power outage starts, the utility usually posts an estimated time of restoration (ETR) on its outage map. Customers plan around it: whether to buy ice, book a hotel, move a medical device. This report tracks a simple question — once posted, does that time hold? Across the completed outages we have graded so far, a majority saw the posted time moved later at least once before the lights actually came back, and multiple revisions per outage are routine (live figures above).

Two honest framings belong next to that finding. First, a revision is not deception — early ETRs are posted before crews have assessed damage, and utilities update them as reality comes in; a moving estimate can still be a good-faith one. Second, on the current sample the utilities' posted times have been, on median, slightly more accurate than our own independent estimates on the same events — we grade ourselves by the same ruler and publish both numbers. The practical takeaway for customers is not "distrust the utility"; it is that the first posted time is an early draft, and planning should carry a margin.

Methodology

Ground truth. We track every US county outage from first report to restoration (the data sources are the DOE/ORNL ODIN national feed plus ~290 utilities' own public outage feeds). An event's actual restoration time is when its outage count first fell to the restored level and stayed there — the same definition our own estimates are graded against publicly.

What counts as a pushback. While an outage is active we sample the utility's posted ETR on every collection pass. A pushback is the posted time moving later within the same outage. Moving earlier, or posting no ETR at all, is not counted against the utility.

Error. For each completed event, every posted ETR is compared against the actual restoration: the median absolute error in hours is the event's score. Our own estimates published during the same event are scored identically — same events, same ruler.

Scope and limits. The sample is completed county-grain events from June 2026 onward where the serving utility posted at least one ETR; it grows daily and the live count is shown above. Utility participation and feed grain vary. We do not publish per-utility comparisons yet: no single utility has enough graded events for a fair ranking. Named per-utility reliability tables will publish when each named utility has at least 10 graded events — the threshold is fixed here in advance.

Cite or reuse this

The underlying ledger is public JSON: accuracy.json (fields oMae/oBias/oN = the utility's posted-ETR grading, oPush = pushback count, mae/bias/n = ours). Cite as “When's the Power Back? — utility restoration-time reliability (living report),” with the date you accessed it, and link this page. Questions or corrections: use the feedback link on the live map.