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Minutes without power: Hawaii's published outage record, 2010 to 2025

Covers 2010 through 2025 · published 2026-08-21 HST

Every year Hawaiian Electric files a set of reliability figures with the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission and publishes them openly. They are spreadsheets, so almost nobody reads them. Read end to end they describe something plain: across all three island groups, the recorded time customers spent without power has roughly doubled since 2022. These are the utility's own numbers, quoted as filed.

The measure, and why it is not about hurricanes

The industry measure is SAIDI: the average number of minutes a customer was without power over a year. The published figures come in two forms, and the difference matters. The normalized series excludes Major Event Days under the IEEE 1366 standard, which is the mechanism that takes hurricanes and other extraordinary storms out of the count. Every figure below is the normalized one, so what it describes is ordinary conditions, not storm damage.

What the record shows

Comparing the thirteen years from 2010 through 2022 against 2024 and 2025:

Oahu averaged 102 minutes a year without power across 2010 to 2022, and 183 minutes across 2024 to 2025. That is 1.79 times the earlier figure.
Maui County went from 147 to 253 minutes, or 1.72 times.
Hawaii Island went from 157 to 319 minutes, or 2.03 times, the largest of the three.

Oahu's own year-by-year figures sat in a narrow band for over a decade, between 82 and 117 minutes every year from 2010 through 2022. They read 132 in 2023, 181 in 2024 and 184 in 2025.

More interruptions, or slower repairs?

The filings answer this, because SAIDI decomposes into two other published measures: SAIFI, how many times the average customer lost power, and CAIDI, how long each interruption lasted.

On Oahu the frequency measure rose 1.48 times while the duration-per-interruption measure rose 1.21 times. So the larger share of Oahu's increase is more interruptions rather than slower restoration. On Hawaii Island the split runs the other way: frequency rose 1.35 times while duration-per-interruption rose 1.51 times.

What this does not say

It does not say why, and the filings do not either. It is not a forecast, and nothing here says the figures will keep rising or level off. It is not a judgment about the utility, and it is not a safety rating for any address: these are island-level annual averages, and no figure here describes a neighbourhood, a street or a customer. Storm years are visible separately in the non-normalized series, where Oahu reads 309 minutes for 2024 against the 181 quoted above, the difference being Major Event Days.

Why we publish it

Because it is a public record that is effectively unread. The numbers are filed, published and unremarkable to find; what was missing was somebody reading fifteen years of them in a row and saying what they contain. That is the whole job.

How to read this. Everything we publish is descriptive: what was recorded, reported, noticed, and sought, in a stated past period, with caveats. Figures are aggregate and de-identified; person-linked counts under 5 are suppressed; per-capita rates use daytime population with 95% confidence bands. Never a forecast, score, ranking, or safety judgment. Full detail: the methodology page.

Reliability figures are Hawaiian Electric's own published Key Performance Metrics, filed with the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission and quoted as filed; SSH is not affiliated with Hawaiian Electric and this is not an official utility publication. Official crime figures derive from data.Honolulu.gov (HPD), modified for use from the original source. The City & County of Honolulu does not vouch for the quality and timeliness of the data presented herein, any analysis of the data presented herein, nor any content, viewpoints, products, or services presented herein. Not endorsed or certified by the U.S. Census Bureau.