No, it’s not just your imagination. Hawaiʻi has been experiencing more frequent power outages in recent years.

On Oʻahu, the average resident experienced about twice as many outages in 2024 as they did the year before the Maui fires, according to a Civil Beat analysis of federal data, although preliminary 2025 numbers show a slight improvement.  

The federal government requires utility companies like Hawaiian Electric Co. to report a variety of data each year that measure the grid’s reliability, including the average number of times consumers lost power and for how long. 

That data shows that even excluding major outlier events such as extreme weather, a failure at a power plant or a car hitting an electrical pole, the power is still going out more frequently across the state – and staying out for longer. 

Even Without Major Storms, Power Is Out More Often 

For the average consumer in Hawaiʻi, outages have become more frequent over the last decade. 

This doesn’t mean everyone has lost power more often – or even at all. The numbers reported to the federal government are an average of all customers served by HECO and its various arms — Hawaii Electric Light Co. on the Big Island and Maui Electric Co. on Maui. That means the numbers are averaged across entire islands or counties, where there could be significant differences in the frequency and duration of outages in one neighborhood or town compared to another. 

Still, that average has risen across all the islands that HECO serves, according to the most recent data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which goes through 2024.

On Oʻahu, HECO customers had gotten used to losing power less than once a year on average since 2019. No longer. Consumers on the island lost power about twice as often – an average of 1.7 times in 2024. 

Hawaiʻi island residents lost power the most. The typical Big Island resident had their lights go dark 3.8 times on average in 2024. That’s more than any year since at least 2014. 

Statewide, HECO’s customers lost power an average of 2.6 times – a significant increase from five years ago when the average household or business lost power 1.5 times.

In Maui County, the number of outages that don’t involve a major incident or storm reached a six-year peak in 2024. Consumers lost power an average of 2.2 times in 2024, the highest since 2018 when the number reached 2.5 times. That number seems to be trending downward, according to preliminary data from last year, though it remains higher than it was before the 2023 fires.

Colton Ching, HECO’s senior vice president of planning and technology, said the increased outages are, at least in part, by design. Following the Lahaina fire, which was traced back to a fallen power line, the company implemented a number of changes to its electrical grid intended to prevent its equipment from sparking another fire. That includes shutting down larger chunks of the grid if a problem is detected. On several occasions the company has preemptively shut off power on Maui and the Big Island. HECO also now doesn’t turn the power back on until someone can go check the line – contributing to longer outages. 

More frequent outages can also be attributed to increasingly volatile weather and more regular storms. While extreme events such as Kona lows or tropical storms are typically filtered out of the normalized data that HECO primarily uses to measure the grid’s day-to-day reliability, smaller storms aren’t. That means less catastrophic — but still increasingly intense — weather could be impacting HECO’s ability to reliably bring power to people across the state. 

In The Dark For Longer

The power isn’t just going out more frequently. It’s staying out for longer. Across the state, power outages lasted an average of one hour and 49 minutes in 2024 – nearly twice as long as the average outage in 2014, which lasted just over an hour.

On the Big Island, the average duration of a power outage in 2024 was roughly double what it was a decade before: more than an hour and a half.

That year, the power was slowest to come back on in Maui County, where it took an average of about two hours and nine minutes for the electricity to come back online in 2024, according to the most recent data. It got slightly faster in 2025, according to preliminary data.

But on Oʻahu, preliminary data from 2025 shows it’s taking longer to get outages resolved on average – about two hours and five minutes, roughly 15 minutes slower than the year before. A decade ago, the average duration of an outage was about an hour and 12 minutes on Oʻahu. 

Because these numbers are averaged across the utility company’s service area, some people are left in the dark for much longer.

Kauaʻi’s Grid Stands Apart

Kauaʻi is the only county not powered by HECO or one of its subsidiaries. The Kauaʻi Island Utility Cooperative was formed in 2002 and operates as a not-for-profit company. The company uses a different formula to calculate the average number of outages per household that were caused by something other than an outlier event such as extreme weather, and that data isn’t available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That makes it hard to compare the grid’s reliability to that of HECO and its subsidiaries.

When storms and other extreme events are included, Kauaʻi’s utility cooperative also saw an increase in the average number of outages compared to the last several years. Consumers served by Kauaʻi’s utility provider experienced an average of 4.4 outages in 2024 – higher than any year since 2019 when the average number of outages in a year soared to 7.1, driven, at least in part, by a cable failure that caused an island-wide outage.