“A Framework and Review of Customer Outage Costs; Integration and Analysis of Electric Utility Outage Cost Surveys”
In 2003 the Office of Electric Transmission and Distribution under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Energy funded a study to analyze 24 previously taken surveys on the subject of power outage costs. In the course of the study numerous interesting conclusions were made and a model to predict the cost of an outage based on significant variables was developed. This study is free and available on the internet.
The authors take the position early in the paper that the major cost of an outage is not experienced by the utility directly, but by the utility’s customers. This means in other words that customer satisfaction is at risk during an outage. In fact the report refers to the model developed to predict the outage cost as the Customer Damage Function. This speaks volumes regarding the effect of an outage on the end customer.
- Time of Day
- Day of Week
- Season
- Type of Enterprise
- Duration of outage
- Location of Enterprise
- Customers dependence on electrical power.
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