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Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

Characteristics and Trends in a National Study of Consumer Outage Costs

Publication Type

Conference Paper

Date Published

06/2003

Authors

Lawton, Leora, Joseph H Eto, Aaron Katz, Michael J Sullivan

Abstract

Ensuring reliability has and will continue to be a priority for electricity industry restructuring. Assessing the balance between public and private actions to ensure reliability should be guided in part by an understanding of the value of reliability to the nations' residential, commercial and industrial customers. Yet, there is no comprehensive body of information on this topic. This paper begins to address this information gap by analyzing studies conducted by electric utilities over the past 15 years to assess the value of electric service to their customers. Outage cost measurements prepared by 7 electric utilities through 20 studies are assembled and standardized into a national database of customer interruption costs. The database is used to describe trends in interruption costs, and regional (geographic) differences, differences in interruption costs by customer type. It can also be used to estimate customer damage functions.. Results from the study are intended to contribute to an improved understanding of the importance of electricity reliability to the nation.

Journal

Center for Research in Regulated Industries (CRRI) Annual Western Conference

Year of Publication

2003