Economic Impacts of Electric Power Outages and Evaluation of Customer Interruption Costs

Abstract

Electricity has become a vital part of the modern societies. Thanks to using electrical equipment in almost every aspect of the life, in case of an interruption the daily routine is paralyzed. Whether the electricity is a social right or not is still debatable. No matter it is a social right or commodity, improving the electric power reliability so that more people (or customers) will have the opportunity to make use of this service is in favor of everyone in the market. Europe has been known to have robust, well developed and well planned electric power systems. This meant considerably high level of reliability for the European societies until the beginning of 2000's. Nevertheless, during the last decade there has been an increase in the number of extreme weather related disasters throughout the world. Natural disasters have become the primary threats for the continuity of electricity service in Europe and in the rest of the world. Studying customer interruption costs and proposing credible and practical estimation methods is a challenging task. The necessity of this research arose from the lack of widely accepted and easy to adopt approaches in the field. Each customer segment has its own distinct electric power consumption and dependence characteristics. This fact indicates the necessity of analyzing each customer group separately and proposing unique customer interruption costs estimation techniques. Having a developed power system and easiness to reach credible data for analysis, Finland is a proper country to study the economic impacts of the electric power interruptions. The ultimate goal of this research is to provide outage cost estimations which will be; customer specific, utilizing publicly declared and objective data, demanding less time, less money and less effort, easy to duplicate in any part of the world and providing credible and sound results. In order to achieve these goals, in this research, the customers are divided into three main segments; industry customers, service customers and residential customers. Different and unique customer interruption costs estimation methodology has been proposed for each customer segment.