I probably didn’t need to Google “how much time does the average American spend without power each year?”

Over some 15 years working remotely for companies across the country (and the globe), I’ve yet to find a single colleague who’s had to tell the boss “Sorry, I don’t have power, and the electric company says it could be a week before it comes back.”

I’ve written that email not once, not twice …

I’ve also yet to see a colleague create a post in the company messaging system warning “We’re expecting a thunderstorm. If I disappear for a few hours, it’s just because we lost power again.”

There have been times when I’ve written that post multiple times over the course of a single month. 

“The power’s out” may as well be code for “it’s a random Thursday” in Sullivan County, and at times it can feel like we’re out here on our own very dark and cold (in the winter) island.

But I’m nothing if not a glutton for punishment. So Sunday morning when I woke up after yet another evening spent in the dark, I typed my query into Google. 

Five and half hours. 

That’s how much time the average American spends without power during an entire year – all 525,600 minutes of it. 

At least seven professional baseball games have run longer than five and a half hours. 

Depending on the route, you can take a non-stop flight from San Francisco to New York City and spend just five and a half hours in the air. 

The average amount of time people across the U.S. spend without power is exactly how much time it would take if you wanted to watch all of Godfather 2 and 75 percent of Godfather 3. 

It’s just a tad bit longer than the chunk of time that residents in my part of the county spent without power this past Saturday night. 

It’s just a tad bit shorter than the amount of time we spent without power on a Saturday last month. 

It’s just shy of half the amount of time 90 Sullivan County residents spent without power on May 4, according to an outage tracker that tracks NYSEG outages in 15-day increments. According to that same tracker 59,077 NYSEG customers in Sullivan County have lost power for some period of time in the past 15 days – Saturday night’s outage stretched from 7pm-3am for some customers. For those keeping count, that’s about two and a half hours beyond the national annual average. 

And as of this month, the third of three rate hikes that NYSEG has been rolling out since 2023 will hit us all here in Sullivan County. For a customer using around 600 kilowatt-hours (about average for a residential account), the latest increase will bring the total hike to about $11.34 which is, you guessed it, nearly double five and a half. 

On second thought, maybe I was better off before I had the power to Google …