Power outages in South Dakota, by utility
Across 13 South Dakota utilities that reported to the federal government, the median customer went without power for 2.4 hours in 2025 — that is 1.3× better than the national median. South Dakota ranks #28 of 41 states for outage time, worst first.
- Median utility
- 2.4 hrs
- typical customer
- Worst utility
- 41.5 hrs
- Black Hills Electric Coop, Inc
- Best utility
- 0.1 hrs
- Watertown Municipal Utilities
- Utilities reporting
- 13
- of 752 nationwide
Every reporting South Dakota utility, worst outage time first
| # | Utility | Outage time/yr | Outages/yr | vs US median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Black Hills Electric Coop, IncCooperative | 41.4 hrs2487 min | 3.4 | 14.0× worse |
| 2 | Black Hills Power, Inc.Investor Owned | 9 hrs541 min | 2.3 | 3.0× worse |
| 3 | MidAmerican Energy CoInvestor Owned | 6.7 hrs399 min | 0.9 | 2.2× worse |
| 4 | Montana-Dakota Utilities CoInvestor Owned | 3.5 hrs212 min | 2.6 | 1.2× worse |
| 5 | Otter Tail Power CoInvestor Owned | 3.2 hrs191 min | 1.7 | 1.1× worse |
| 6 | Northern States Power Co - MinnesotaInvestor Owned | 2.7 hrs160 min | 0.9 | 1.1× better |
| 7 | Rosebud Electric Coop IncCooperative | 2.3 hrs141 min | 0.8 | 1.3× better |
| 8 | NorthWestern Energy - (SD)Investor Owned | 2 hrs120 min | 1.1 | 1.5× better |
| 9 | Northern Electric Coop, IncCooperative | 1.2 hrs72 min | 0.7 | 2.5× better |
| 10 | Sioux Valley SW Elec CoopCooperative | 1 hrs59 min | 1.6 | 3.0× better |
| 11 | West River Electric Assn IncCooperative | 0.4 hrs24 min | 0.3 | 7.4× better |
| 12 | City of Brookings - (SD)Municipal | 0.2 hrs13 min | 0.1 | 13.5× better |
| 13 | Watertown Municipal UtilitiesMunicipal | 0.1 hrs4 min | 0.1 | 41.9× 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.