Evaluation of Power Outage Costs for Industrial and Service Sectors in Finland

Abstract

Electric power business has changed dramatically for the past 30 years. There is a considerable change in the structure and electric power system operation throughout the world. Having an unbundled and competitive electric market, Finland is a proper country to study power outage costs for industrial and service sector customers.

An electric power outage, which has many social and most importantly economical outcomes, is an undesired and unpleasant event that leads to inevitable damages to the society. Regardless of its psychological effects, preventing power outages presents a vital importance due to its severe effects on economy. Therefore, since it has so many motivating factors, studying and estimating the outage costs have been an attractive and popular field of study for the recent years.

There are several methods used in assessing the customer costs of electric power outages. Among all, three major classes; indirect analytical methods, customer surveys and case studies, are commonly used in the power business and academic studies The main purpose of this thesis is to develop a proper mathematical model to be able to reach a conclusion to make estimations about the customer outage costs and to give the utilities and large power consuming customers an idea about these costs. At this point, a way to find out an almost linear model for this problem will be sought.