powercut

How many minutes a year the lights go out

Average minutes without power per customer per year from unplanned interruptions, as each country’s energy regulator reports it. The darker the country, the longer people sat in the dark.

2018

Ranked, 2018

Minutes per customer for the year on the slider. The live map’s countries link to their own pages.

    Year by year

    Each country on its own scale, 2010 to 2018. Storms make most of the spikes: the Boxing Day storms in Finland (2011), the ice storm in Slovenia (2014), storms Darwin (2014) and Ophelia (2017) in Ireland. Latvia went from over 1,000 minutes in 2010 to about 100 in 2018.

    About the numbers

    The figure is SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index): the total minutes customers spent without power from unplanned interruptions in a year, divided by the number of customers. It includes storms and other exceptional events. Countries measure it in slightly different ways (Spain, for example, reports it for the medium-voltage grid), so small differences between countries mean little; differences of ten times do not.

    Source: CEER–ECRB 7th Benchmarking Report on the Quality of Electricity and Gas Supply (2022), Annex B, table A2. France is not in the table. For what is happening now, see the live map and the history since October 2026.