Thousands of homes and businesses in Denver lost power Tuesday afternoon on Election Day, with utility officials saying it could take hours to get the lights back on. The Denver Post reported that 6,178 Xcel Energy customers were without power as of 3 p.m. A car hit a utility pole near 12th Avenue and Detroit Street shortly after 2 p.m., causing the widespread outages.
The affected area first lost power shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday, according to The Denver Post, citing Xcel's outage map. Most outages appeared centered in Denver's Cheesman Park and City Park neighborhoods. Xcel had estimated restoration by 6:15 p.m. Tuesday, though it remains unclear whether that timeline held.
Despite the scale of the outage, voting operations in Denver did not appear to be affected. The Denver County Clerk's Office reported no outages at voting centers as of 2:40 p.m. Tuesday, even as thousands of nearby residents went without electricity during a high-stakes election day.
Not the First Election-Day Power Scare
Denver wasn't alone in facing power trouble at the polls Tuesday. In Kansas City, an outage knocked out electricity during morning voter turnout at Blue Ridge Church of Christ, a south-side polling location, according to kctv5.com. Election Board technicians there deployed battery backup units to keep check-in stations and voting equipment running while officials directed some voters to nearby sites.
The Denver outage also lands amid a broader pattern of deteriorating reliability across Xcel's Colorado service territory. A Colorado Public Utilities Commission investigation found that outages were more frequent and lasted longer in 2024 and 2025 than in the prior nine years, a trend that continued into the first half of 2026, according to denverpost.com. PUC staff reported hotspots for the problems in sections of Denver and Lakewood, along with a few mountain communities and parts of the San Luis Valley.
Regulators Point to Frequency, Not Just Big Storms
The numbers behind that investigation are striking. Xcel customers experienced an above-average number of outages in every single month of 2024, 2025 and the first half of 2026, per coloradosun.com. Average outage time per customer climbed to 89 minutes in just the first six months of 2026, compared with a 95-minute annual average across the entire 2015-2023 stretch, the outlet reported.
PUC staffer Nick Bongiardina told the Colorado Sun that the uptick wasn't driven by major storms but by something more mundane: a rise in shorter, more frequent blackouts. In 2024 alone, 90,000 Xcel customers experienced at least six outages, a 10-year record, the same report notes. Boulder has felt its own version of the strain, with residents and businesses there losing power six times since Aug. 20 amid wildfire threats and aging infrastructure, according to the Denver Post's September report.
Tuesday's outage was far smaller than the system failure that hit the Denver metro area in February, when a transformer failure at an Xcel substation knocked out power to more than 195,000 customers. The last of those customers didn't see their power restored until around 5:45 p.m. that day, the Denver Post reported at the time. Whether Tuesday's smaller-scale outage followed a similar pattern had not been established as of Tuesday afternoon.
