What Causes Outages?

Did you know damage from one tree can cause a power outages for thousands of customers? In fact, damage from trees is the leading cause of time without power for KUB customers.

KUB works continually to improve the reliability of electric service for our customers. To do so, KUB carefully evaluates and measures all power outages. When there is a power outage, the cause of the outage is investigated and categorized into five major categories, which can be reviewed in the Outage Cause Codes by Customer Minutes of Interruption (CMI) .

The electric industry measures electric service reliability in Customer Minutes of Interruption (CMI). Customer Minutes of Interruption are calculated by multiplying the number of customers affected by the outage by the duration of the outages (in minutes). For example, an outage affecting five customers for twenty minutes results in 100 Customer Minutes of Interruption. The electric industry looks at Customer Minutes of Interruption in addition to the number of outage events, because the overall impact of the outage is more clear in the time the customers are without power.