The big story for 2025: WEC saw a significant drop in the number of outages and outage hours. Compared to 2024 the number of outages decreased 20%, and the time members went without power dropped by 35%.
Ongoing grid improvements help, but a year of relatively mild weather is the main factor behind these encouraging statistics. There were no major storms in 2025—that is, no weather events that met the specific criteria for the category of major storm.
There were still plenty of severe weather events, including heavy icing, high winds, and intense summer thunderstorms. These were damaging, but tended not to be widespread. Dave Kresock, WEC’s Director of Operations and Engineering, reported, “Even though the number of severe weather events in 2025 remained high, the decrease in outages can be attributed to how many of them were very localized to various parts of Vermont; sometimes affecting WEC’s territory and other times not.”
The industry metrics that measure system interruption frequencyand customer interruption duration are averages. They exclude major storm data, which can skew the assessment of how reliable the utility is under normal conditions. From a member perspective, the absence of major storms makes 2025 a good year to establish WEC’s baseline. WEC’s performance target for interruption frequency is 3.8, and the average customer experienced 3.9 outages over the year: just .1 over the target. Average outage time beat the target of 2.7 hours: the average outage lasted 2.3 hours, about 20 minutes shorter than the target.
Two thirds of 2025 outages were caused by trees. That’s no surprise in WEC’s rural, forested service area. What’s interesting is that the total number of tree-related outages is down (at 475 outages, a 4.2% decrease from 2024), although the percentage of tree-related outages is up (66% of outages, an 11% increase from 2024). That’s because outages caused specifically by weather are down 74.8% in 2025, so trees take up a bigger piece of the pie.
Tree and weather-related outages were down, but outages caused by equipment failure, company initiation, and power supplier— the transmission company that delivers power to our substations, which is either VELCO or Green Mountain Power—were all slightly up. Outages caused by accidents were also up, although outages caused by accidents were short in duration: in fact, the duration of accident-caused outages was at its lowest since 2017.
Kresock noted that his team is building on WEC’s existing Construction Work Plan with additional grid-hardening projects: for example, this fall on Bliss Road in East Montpelier, WEC replaced 46 poles, relocated off-road lines, and replaced unprotected conductors with the stronger Hendrix Cable Spacer System. In December, a second project began to upgrade the Greensboro feeder line from the Walden substation to a more resilient three-phase line, also using the Hendrix Cable Spacer System. To learn more about this system, see the October-November 2025 issue of Co-op Currents.
324
Distribution transformers installed or replaced in 2025
11,655
Average number of WEC member households in 2025, up 76 from 2024
1,250
Miles of line in WEC service territory
(or about 100 miles per lineworker)
724
Separate outages on WEC’s system in 2025
(for comparison: 906 in 2024, 776 is 10 year rolling average)
103,821
Number of WEC consumer hours out in 2025
(for comparison: 159,960 in 2024, 102,300 is 10 year rolling average)
0
Weather events that met major storm criteria in 2025
65.6%
Percentage of 2025 outages caused by trees
(for comparison: 55% in 2024)
2.3
Average duration in hours for outages caused by trees
475
Number of 2025 outages caused by trees
(for comparison: 496 in 2024)
14
Number of line rehabilitation projects added to WEC’s existing construction work plan
For updates about maintenance clearing, click Right-of-Way and Field Work Notices on wec.coop.