Understanding the cost of power interruptions to U.S. electricity consumers
By K. LaCommare, Joseph H. Eto. 2004
257 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The massive electric power blackout in the northeastern United States and Canada on August 14-15, 2003 resulted in the U.S. electricity system being called ''antiquated'' and catalyzed discussions about modernizing the grid. Industry sources suggested that investments of $50 to $100 billion would be needed. This report seeks to quantify an important piece of information that has been missing from these discussions: how much do power interruptions and fluctuations in power quality (power-quality events) cost U.S. electricity consumers? Accurately estimating this cost will help assess the potential benefits of investments in improving the reliability of the grid. We develop a comprehensive end-use framework for assessing the cost to U.S. electricity consumers of power interruptions and power-quality events (referred to collectively as ''reliability events''). The framework expresses these costs as a function of: (1) Number of customers by type in a region; (2) Frequency and type of reliability events experienced annually (including both power interruptions and power-quality events) by these customers; (3) Cost of reliability events; and (4) Vulnerability of customers to these events. The framework is designed so that its cost estimate can be improved as additional data become available. Using our framework, we estimate that the national cost of power interruptions is about $80 billion annually, based on the best information available in the public domain. However, there are large gaps in and significant uncertainties about the information currently available. Notably, we were not able to develop an estimate of power-quality events. Sensitivity analysis of some of these uncertainties suggests that the total annual cost could range from less than $30 billion to more than $130 billion. Because of this large range and the enormous cost of the decisions that may be based on this estimate, we encourage policy makers, regulators, and industry to jointly under take the comparatively modest-cost improvements needed in the information used to estimate the cost of reliability events. Specific areas for improvement include: coordinated, nationwide collection of updated information on the cost of reliability events; consistent definition and recording of the duration and frequency of reliability events, including power-quality events; and improved information on the costs of and efforts by consumers to reduce their vulnerability to reliability events.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05d46fa83fdee9927b7b36b107b749b772b1226c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
In Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Citations in the corpus
- Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions (2004, background): “For example, power outages in the United States alone are estimated to result in a cost of US $80 billion per year (LaCommare and Eto 2004), and weather-related events account for 60% of the customers affected by grid disturbances in the bulk power markets (see figure 1.”
- Conceptualizing Energy Security (2012, background): “…Gas and Ele SAIDI weighted by their share of heat supply Based on the outage cost per customer for different outage durations in the USA reported in (LaCommare and Eto 2004) we calculated the loss VOLLj,k for each sector j that is caused by an outage of duration k in % of the yearly GDP of that…”
- History, Evolution, and Future Status of Energy Storage (2012, background): “industry [2] each year because of mainly short power interruptions.”