Data & history
Charleston Lowcountry power outage history
Charleston has weathered hurricanes for centuries, and between the big storms, the peninsula now floods on clear days at high tide. Here's the recent record of what has taken the Lowcountry grid down across Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester counties, and why standby power is so common here.
70%
of SCE&G’s customers lost power after Hugo (1989)
~17 days
to fully restore power after Hugo, despite 30-day estimates
~110,000
SC customers out at Hurricane Ian’s peak (2022), ~90% Lowcountry
130,000+
Charleston County outages during Hurricane Dorian (2019)
| Year | Event | Impact on the grid |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Hurricane Idalia | Came ashore in Florida’s Big Bend, then pushed the third-highest tide ever recorded at Charleston Harbor (~9.2 ft) into the peninsula, downtown flooding and scattered Lowcountry outages, without even a direct hit. |
| 2022 | Hurricane Ian | Made a second U.S. landfall near Georgetown on Sept. 30. Dominion Energy outages in South Carolina peaked around 110,000 customers, roughly 90% of them in the Lowcountry, with Charleston County the hardest hit. |
| 2019 | Hurricane Dorian | Paralleled the coast as a major hurricane. More than 200,000 South Carolina customers lost power, including 130,000-plus in Charleston County alone. |
| 2017 | Hurricane Irma | Even as a distant, weakening storm it drove a ~9.9 ft tide into Charleston Harbor, one of the highest on record, flooding downtown and knocking out power across the tri-county. |
| 2016 | Hurricane Matthew | Brushed the coast with damaging wind, record rainfall, and flooding. Hundreds of thousands of South Carolinians lost power, many of them in the Lowcountry, some for days. |
| 1989 | Hurricane Hugo | The benchmark. A Category 4 landfall just north of Charleston sent a ~20 ft surge up the coast. SCE&G (now Dominion) lost power to about 70% of its 427,000 customers, roughly 130,000 in the Charleston district alone. A week after landfall only about a quarter of Charleston had electricity; full restoration took ~17 days and 4,700 crew from 15 states. |
| Ongoing | King-tide / “sunny-day” flooding | Charleston now floods on dozens of days a year at high tide, no storm required, steadily corroding and stressing low-lying grid infrastructure between the big events. |
Figures compiled from SCE&G / Dominion Energy restoration reports and press releases, the National Academies’ Hurricane Hugo assessment, NOAA / National Hurricane Center summaries and Charleston Harbor tide records, and local reporting (The Post and Courier, Live 5 News/WCSC, WCBD News 2). Outage counts are peak or point-in-time approximations; the takeaway is the pattern: major storms plus chronic tidal flooding. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite this page with attribution; email us for the underlying storm-by-storm figures.
Why the Lowcountry over-indexes on backup power
Two things stack up here that don't elsewhere. First, Charleston sits on a low, flat peninsula between two rivers, so the same storms that knock down lines also push saltwater into the streets and substations, the grid gets hit from above and below at once. Second, the region floods between storms: NOAA now records dozens of high-tide flood days a year in Charleston, and each one chips away at aging, low-lying infrastructure.
The result is a place where outages are frequent, occasionally very long (Hugo left parts of Charleston dark for well over two weeks), and increasingly routine even in fair weather. That's why permanently installed standby generators, which start automatically and run on natural gas or propane, have gone from a coastal luxury to a common-sense fixture across Charleston, Mount Pleasant, Summerville, and the islands.
The pattern is why we exist: do you need a standby generator? See the Lowcountry hub or your city page for local detail.
Don’t ride out the next one in the dark
Get a free, no-pressure quote from a vetted local installer, or call now to talk it through.