About
About Power Grid Watch
Power Grid Watch is an independent public-service guide to power outages and the electric grid in the United States. It helps you find the official source you need and understand what the information means.
Who we are
Power Grid Watch is published by InfoBakery. It is not a utility and it is not a government agency. We cannot restore power, take outage reports, or speak for any utility or agency.
Our address ends in .org, but that does not mean we are a registered nonprofit or a tax-exempt charity. We are not. The .org reflects the public-service purpose of the site, not a legal status.
The questions we aim to answer
The site is built around five questions people ask when the power goes out or the grid is in the news:
- Is there an outage near me? Reported outages for your area or utility, with the source, the time and what is covered. We cannot tell whether a particular home has power.
- When will power return? Only your utility can estimate this. We will point you to its estimate, and we will never make up our own.
- How reliable is electricity here? How often and how long outages happen each year, explained so the averages are not mistaken for a forecast.
- Is the regional grid under strain? Official notices from grid operators, kept separate from local outages.
- What should I do, and what do the headlines mean? Official safety guidance, weather alerts and plain explanations of the news.
What exists today and what is planned
Today
- A page for every state and Washington, DC, with official links to regulators, state offices and utilities. Find your state.
- Plain guides to the grid, reliability and preparing for outages.
- A clear list of sources and coverage.
- No live data. We do not show outage counts, alerts or reliability figures yet.
Planned
- National information first, such as annual reliability, major incident history, regional grid conditions, weather alerts and long-term hazards. Each will be added only after it has been checked.
- Then deeper local coverage across the six New England states.
- Weather-based outage forecasts are a research question only. We do not know yet whether they can be done well, and we are not promising them.
We are not giving dates. We would rather publish something correct later than something wrong sooner.
Principles
- Urgent information is free. Outage, safety and alert information will not be behind a paywall.
- No account needed. You can use everything on this site without signing up.
- We do not track your precise location. You choose your state or area yourself. We do not ask for your GPS location.
- We say what we do not know. Missing, old or unavailable information will be labeled as such, never shown as zero or as a reassuring message.
- Sources come first. Every figure will show where it came from and when. Where we are not sure we may reuse a source's data, we link to it instead.
- Sponsors never shape what we show. We have no sponsors today. If we ever do, sponsored content will be clearly labeled and kept apart from outage and safety information. No sponsor will be able to affect what is shown, how severe something looks, or how it is described. We will not sell information about who may be vulnerable to outages.
What this site is not
Please read
This site is not an emergency service or an alert system. Call 911 in an emergency, including for a downed power line. Report outages to your own utility. If someone in your home relies on electricity for medical needs, do not rely on this site. See Prepare and get help.
Corrections
We want to get things right, and we welcome corrections. If you find a broken link, a utility we missed, a link that goes to the wrong place, or an explanation that is wrong or unclear, please let us know. We will check the report against official sources, fix what is wrong, and note significant changes.
A contact address will be posted here shortly.
Please do not send us outage or emergency reports. We cannot pass reports to utilities. Contact your utility directly, or call 911.