Cps Energy said on April 27 that power outages lasted longer and hit more customers last year, as storms and planned maintenance work pushed the utility’s reliability metrics in the wrong direction. Elaina Ball told the board that the average outage stretched to 75 minutes in 2025, about 15 minutes longer than the prior year, while more than 1.1 million customers were affected.

The utility said the number of customers hit by outages rose by 169,062 from the year before. CPS Energy measures those figures on fiscal years that run from Feb. 1 to Jan. 31, and it said customers in 2023 and 2024 had experienced outages of just over an hour on average before the increase in 2025.

Ball said the main drivers were more storms than the utility had forecast and planned outages tied to maintenance work. She said CPS Energy plans around weather-normalized conditions, but that the year brought a significant number of storms. The utility also said it will take additional steps to reduce weather-related disruption, including tree-trimming.

Milady Nazir said CPS Energy is continuing to prepare for severe weather through grid hardening, vegetation management, targeted infrastructure upgrades and data-driven reliability improvements. The utility has also said climate change is linked to more intense storms and weather-related events, which could mean more weather-related outages ahead.

There is a catch in the numbers: the same safety work that is meant to protect employees is likely to keep outages longer. Ball said average outage duration is expected to rise in coming years because CPS Energy will keep turning off power lines when workers are doing dangerous jobs. The utility also missed its internal worker safety metrics and reported its highest number of employee injuries in six years, with 51 injuries last year. Nearly half were muscle or skeletal injuries, and Ball said the utility is stepping up education on preventive measures during onboarding and training.

For customers, the immediate takeaway is that longer outages may not be a one-year problem. For the utility, the harder test is whether it can keep hardening the grid and protecting workers without asking customers to absorb more downtime when the weather turns bad or maintenance work cannot wait.