Power Outage Alerts by County & Site - US Utilities Data

Pulls the live US county outage feed from the DOE / Oak Ridge National Laboratory ODIN program, tells you which of your sites sit in an affected county, and alerts you when an outage is new, getting worse, or restored, using history it keeps between runs. For insurers, retail and restaurant chains, telecom and facilities teams, and anyone who wants outage data without scraping utility maps.

Read this first - coverage: ODIN contains only utilities that choose to publish to it (about 90 utilities, roughly 27 states in the feed today, reported at around a quarter of US customers - we have not verified that figure). A county missing from the feed is NOT proof the power is on. County totals count meters out across participating utilities in that county, not your building.

Example inputs

1. Default demo (no setup): lists the 25 biggest current outages and checks two demo sites.

{}

2. Watch your sites by coordinates and county, alert only on changes, schedule every 15 minutes

{ "sites": [ {"name":"Store 12","lat":29.76,"lng":-95.37}, {"name":"DC East","state":"NY","county":"Dutchess"}, {"name":"HQ","fips":"06083"} ],
  "maxOutageRecords": 0, "siteAlertMinMeters": 500, "escalationPercent": 50, "onlyChanges": true, "webhookUrl": "https://example.com/hook" }

3. State-level outage list for a report

{ "sites": [], "states": ["TX","CA"], "maxOutageRecords": 100 }

Input guide

Field	What it does
sites	JSON list. Each: name plus lat+lng, or fips, or state+county.
maxOutageRecords	County/utility outage rows to list, largest first (0 = site alerts only).
states	Limit the listed rows to these states (site matching still uses the whole feed).
siteAlertMinMeters	County total at which a site counts as affected.
escalationPercent	Growth (or crossing 1k / 10k / 50k meters) that triggers ESCALATED.
onlyChanges	Suppress repeat alerts for unchanged ongoing outages.
webhookUrl	POST each billed alert as JSON. Never fails the run.
stateStoreName	Named key-value store holding last totals and a rolling 600-point history per county.

Output

Field	Meaning
type	outage-record, site-alert (billed), site-status (free), error (free)
alert	NEW, ESCALATED, ONGOING, RESTORED, CLEAR
metersAffected, previousMetersAffected, changePct	County total now vs the previous run
severity	minor (<1k), moderate, major (10k+), severe (50k+)
utilities, earliestReportedStart, estimatedRestoration, cause	Context from the feed
matchedBy	point-in-county, state-county, fips, or why nothing matched
recentHistory[]	Last readings kept in your store for that county

Sample site alert: {"type":"site-alert","site":"Dutchess pt","matchedBy":"point-in-county","county":"Dutchess","state":"New York","metersAffected":1598,"alert":"NEW","severity":"moderate","utilities":["CENTRAL HUDSON GAS & ELEC CORP"]}

Use it with

Google Maps scraper (store locations) or your CRM export -> sites -> this Actor on a 15-minute schedule -> webhook to Slack/PagerDuty/Zapier.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? The ODIN public "Real-time Outages (County)" dataset on the ORNL Open Energy Hub (publisher: Oak Ridge National Laboratory / U.S. DOE Office of Electricity; county boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau). The dataset metadata asserts no licence; we attribute it and use only the public, key-less feed. How fresh is it? The feed updates about hourly; each utility's own cadence applies. Why no outages in my state? Your utilities may not publish to ODIN. This Actor cannot see them. Can it tell if my building is dark? No. It tells you the county is affected and how big the outage is. It is a trigger to check, not a meter. How does escalation work? History is stored per site in your named store. Run it on a schedule: NEW when a site crosses your threshold, ESCALATED on growth or tier jumps, RESTORED when it drops back.

Limits

County-level only (the authenticated ODIN API is finer but requires an account). Participating utilities only. First run has no history, so everything affected is NEW.

Price

outage-record $0.002 per listed record, site-alert $0.01 per NEW / ESCALATED / RESTORED alert. Example: a 15-minute schedule on 40 sites with 3 alerts a day costs about $0.03/day. Status rows and errors are free.