Strong thunderstorms moving through Minnesota overnight into Wednesday morning left just over 52,000 Xcel Energy customers without power by 5 a.m., with the utility reporting about 579 outages statewide.
The outages came as severe weather swept across the state, including parts of the northeast Twin Cities metro, where thunderstorms, lightning, heavy rain and wind gusts above 60 mph were possible early Wednesday. Xcel Energy had been monitoring the storm threat since Tuesday night across western, southern and central Minnesota, as well as western Wisconsin, and said crews were prepared to respond.
The company said it would focus first on the largest outages so it could restore power to the greatest number of customers as quickly as possible. That leaves the scale of the cleanup still unresolved for thousands of households, with no restoration timeline provided early Wednesday.
Customers can report outages and follow repair progress on the Xcel Energy outage map, which the utility said has the latest information on electrical outages. For now, the map is the clearest picture of how widely the storms hit: hundreds of separate outages, spread across Minnesota before daybreak, with more weather moving through the region.
