What Form OE-417 is, and what it is not
What Form OE-417 is
Form OE-417, Electric Emergency Incident and Disturbance Report, is how the U.S. Department of Energy learns about serious grid incidents. Filing is required by federal law when an incident meets one of 24 criteria on the form. DOE posts the filings as one Excel summary per year.
The files include far more than blackouts. Vandalism, suspicious activity, equipment trouble, voltage reductions and public appeals to save power are all reportable, which is why this site calls the rows reports rather than outages.
When a report has to be filed
| Report due | Examples of what triggers it (form edition expiring 31 May 2021) |
|---|---|
| Within one hour | Physical attack or cyber event that interrupts operations; complete shutdown of a transmission or distribution system; islanding; uncontrolled loss of 300 MW or more for more than 15 minutes; firm load shedding of 100 MW or more; system-wide voltage reduction of 3 percent or more; public appeal to cut electricity use |
| Within six hours | Loss of electric service to more than 50,000 customers for one hour or more; physical attack that could affect reliability; vandalism of security systems; cyber event that could affect reliability; fuel supply emergency |
| By the later of 24 hours or the end of the next business day | Damage or destruction of a facility; suspicious device or activity at a facility or control center; uncontrolled loss of 200 MW or more for 15 minutes or more (for entities with peak demand of 3,000 MW or less); complete loss of off-site power at a nuclear plant; unexpected loss of three or more transmission facilities |
| Update, then final report within 72 hours | Schedule 1 is updated as facts change and the full narrative is filed within 72 hours |
The form has been revised over the years; the criteria above come from the instructions with OMB expiration date 05/31/21. Source: DOE OE-417 page.
OE-417 compared with SAIDI and SAIFI
| OE-417 reports | SAIDI and SAIFI | |
|---|---|---|
| What is counted | Individual incidents above DOE thresholds, as filed | Average outage minutes and interruptions per customer for a utility and year |
| Who files | Utilities, balancing authorities, reliability coordinators | Utilities, to EIA on Form 861 |
| Major storms | Included; large storms are the point | Often excluded as major event days under IEEE 1366 |
| Small outages | Missing unless a threshold is met | Included |
| Best use | Seeing which large incidents were filed, when, where and why | Comparing everyday reliability between utilities and states |
For minutes without power per customer, see reliability by state. The two sources answer different questions, so a state can look calm in one and busy in the other.
What this site did with the files
- Read the yearly Excel files for 2014 to 2023: 2,516 reports.
- Read state names from the area field. 54 reports name no state we could read; they stay in the CSV.
- A report that names several states counts once in each.
- 28 reports had no start date; we used the restoration date and left the duration blank.
- 1,538 reports list no customer count or list zero.
- Grouped DOE's free-text event types into seven cause groups by keywords. The DOE wording is kept in every table.
- Used the files for 2014 to 2023 only.
Where to go next
Sources
DOE publishes one file per year at its OE-417 annual summary page; we read the 9 Dec 2024 archive copy. The form instructions give the criteria above.
Questions
What does OE-417 stand for?
It is the number of the Department of Energy form, Electric Emergency Incident and Disturbance Report.
Does every blackout appear in OE-417?
No. Only incidents that meet a filing criterion do, such as more than 50,000 customers out for an hour or more.
Why do some reports have no customer count?
Many reportable events, such as vandalism or a public appeal, do not involve lost customers. 1,538 of 2,516 reports here list none.
Why not use OE-417 to rank reliability?
Counts depend on filing habits and utility size, and small outages are missing. SAIDI and SAIFI are built for comparison.
How often is the data updated?
DOE posts one summary per year. This site's copy runs through 2023 and was read from an Internet Archive snapshot dated 9 Dec 2024.