Data sources & how they refresh
Everything on the site comes from the public sources below. "Live" means refreshed on the cadences listed — not second-by-second.
ODIN (DOE / Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
The national outage baseline: how many customers each participating utility reports out, by county. Public-domain federal data. We refresh it about every 15 minutes. ODIN covers the vast majority of US electricity customers, but participation and update speed vary by utility — a brand-new outage can take a cycle or two to appear, and a few utilities don't report at all. Missing data is not the same as zero outages.
Utility outage maps (deep detail)
For ~280 utilities we also read the utility's own public outage map feed — the same data behind the map on their website — which adds city/area-level counts and any official restoration times. Refreshed about every few minutes for utilities with active outages. Where a utility publishes no feed, you'll see the county baseline only ("coverage: county-level reporting").
NWS (National Weather Service)
Active weather alerts (warnings, watches, advisories) by county — public-domain, refreshed with the baseline about every 15 minutes. Used for context and for the restoration estimate's weather awareness.
HIFLD electric territories
The federal Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data map of which utility serves which area. Used to answer "who's my utility?" when you search an address. Territory boundaries are approximate and can overlap (some places are served by more than one company).
Geocoding — Zippopotam, OpenStreetMap/Nominatim, Census, FCC
Turning your ZIP, city, or address into a location, and that location into a county. OpenStreetMap data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Lookups happen on demand when you search; nothing about your search is stored.
Why this site can differ from your utility's map
- Utilities update their own maps on their own schedule; our county baseline refreshes ~every 15 minutes — the two can be minutes apart in either direction.
- Some utilities report "customers out" differently (meters vs. accounts vs. incidents); we show what each source reports.
- Our restoration estimate is independent — it's computed from the live recovery pattern, not copied from the utility. When the utility posts an official time, we show both, labeled separately. See how accurate our estimates are.
- County-grain numbers can lag or smooth over street-level reality — your circuit may be restored earlier or later than the county-wide picture.
Known gaps
- A small share of co-ops and municipal utilities publish no machine-readable feed and appear only via the ODIN baseline, or not at all.
- During the largest storms, upstream feeds can time out or briefly go stale — the site says "Data delayed" rather than guessing.
- Territory and geocoding lookups are approximate near boundaries.
Independent and unofficial — not affiliated with any utility, the Department of Energy, or the National Weather Service. For emergencies always follow official guidance.