Costs Of Power Outages Research Articles

Quality of supply regulations versus societal priorities regarding electricity outage consequences: Case study in a Swedish context

Modern society is increasingly dependent on a reliable supply of electricity. Depending on where an electricity outage occurs and who is affected the consequences may range from a mere nuisance to major economic losses or actual threats against the health and safety of citizens. The direct costs of power outages have been assessed in numerous studies, however electricity outages normally also entail indirect costs as well as societal costs. Examples of the latter include impairment of societal functions, impact on health and even loss of life. It is unclear to what extent quality of supply regulations are capturing indirect and societal costs. To address this, a case study is here carried out for electricity customers in a city in Sweden. We investigate to what extent two Swedish quality of supply regulations are reflected in the societal priorities embodied in the Swedish Styrel system. The Styrel system has been in operation since 2011 and is designed to be used during times of power shortage at a national level to prioritize power supply to customers based on their importance for society. Results from the study indicate that electricity customers that are critical for maintaining life and health or vital societal functions seems not to be given due attention in the present regulations.

Optimal distribution system restoration using PHEVs

Power outages cost billions of dollars every year and jeopardise the lives of hospital patients. Traditionally, power distribution system takes a long time to recover after a major blackout, due to its top-down operation strategy. New technologies in modern distribution systems bring opportunities and challenges to distribution system restoration. As fast response energy resources, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) can accelerate the load pickup by compensating the imbalance between available generation and distribution system load. This study provides a bottom-up restoration strategy to use PHEVs for reliable load pickup and faster restoration process. The optimisation problem of finding load pickup sequence to maximise restored energy is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Moreover, the coordination between transmission and distribution restoration is developed to efficiently restore the entire system back to normal operating conditions. Simulation results on one 100-feeder test system demonstrate the efficiency of MILP-based restoration strategy and the benefit from PHEVs to restore more energy in given restoration time. The proposed restoration strategy has great potential to facilitate system operators to achieve efficient system restoration plans. It also provides incentives to deploy a large amount of PHEVs to improve system resiliency.

Spinning Reserve Capacity Optimization of a Power System When Considering Wind Speed Correlation

Usually, the optimal spinning reserve is studied by considering the balance between the economy and reliability of a power system. However, the uncertainties from the errors of load and wind power output forecasting have seldom been considered. In this paper, the optimal spinning reserve capacity of a power grid considering the wind speed correlation is investigated by Nataf transformation. According to the cost–benefit analysis method, the objective function for describing the optimal spinning reserve capacity is established, which considers the power cost, reserve cost, and expected cost of power outages. The model was solved by the quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm, based on stochastic simulation. Furthermore, the impact of the related factors on the optimal spinning reserve capacity is analyzed by a test system. From the simulation results, the model and algorithm are proved to be feasible. The method provided in this paper offers a useful tool for the dispatcher when increasing wind energy is integrated into power systems.

Reliability, availability and maintainability study for failure analysis in series capacitor bank

In this research, the objective is introducing the fundamentals of reliability analysis, it has been applied to the planning and design of Series Capacitor (SC) Bank, applied for power lines. It considers the cost of power outages, the decision process for new and existing power equipment in several systems, as well as the ability to make quantitative analysis “Cost – Vs. - Reliability” trade-off studies. The lack of credible data concerning equipment reliability and the cost of power outages has hindered engineers in making such studies. The study case considers a Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) calculations, it has been performed for the series capacitor banks to be located at Cotaruse 220 kV, 4500 m over sea level (mosl) in a substation, located in Peru. The calculations are divided into forced and scheduled outages. A crew delay (for example: travel time) of 2 h, as well as 1 h for switching, have been included in calculations. The results are divided into forced and scheduled outages with a reliability calculation and spare parts are listed in this research.

The cost of electric power outages in the residential sector: A willingness to pay approach

Service providers and policymakers require data on the value of a service to consumers to justify investment. Due to the high reliability of electricity services in Europe, data on the value of constant electricity supply is not available. A choice experiment framework is used to estimate the welfare cost to households of power outages in northwest England. The willingness to pay (WTP) estimates obtained suggest that a household in northwest England is WTP; £5.29 to avoid having power outages in peak periods, £7.37 to have outages during the week rather than the weekend or bank holiday, and £31.37 to avoid power outages in winter. Households are also WTP between £1.17 (20 min) and £0.05 (480 min) to avoid a power outage depending on the length of the power outage. The use of a mixed logit model also demonstrated the impact of different socio-demographic and household characteristics on respondents WTP to avoid a power outage. From a policy perspective, the results provide data or a 'price' on the importance of constant electricity supply to domestic customers. Through engagement with policy makers and industry, these 'price signals' may be used to justify future investment and policy in the electricity sector.

Effect of global warming on willingness to pay for uninterrupted electricity supply in European nations

Predicted changes in temperature and other weather events may damage the electricity grid and cause power outages. Understanding the costs of power outages and how these costs change over time with global warming can inform outage-mitigation-investment decisions. Here we show that across 19 EU nations the value of uninterrupted electricity supply is strongly related to local temperatures, and will increase as the climate warms. Bayesian hierarchical modelling of data from a choice experiment and respondent-specific temperature measures reveals estimates of willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid an hour of power outage between €0.32 and €1.86 per household. WTP varies on the basis of season and is heterogeneous between European nations. Winter outages currently cause larger per household welfare losses than summer outages per hour of outage. However, this dynamic will begin to shift under plausible future climates, with summer outages becoming substantially more costly and winter outages becoming slightly less costly on a per-household, per-hour basis.

Two-Stage Adaptive Restoration Decision Support System for a Self-Healing Power Grid

Power outages cost American industries and businesses billions of dollars and jeopardize the lives of hospital patients. The losses can be greatly reduced with a fast, reliable, and flexible self-healing tool. This paper is aimed to tackle the challenging task of developing an adaptive restoration decision support system (RDSS). The proposed RDSS determines restoration actions both in planning and real-time phases and adapts to constantly changing system conditions. The comprehensive formulation encompasses practical constraints including ac power flow, dynamic reserve, and load modeling. The combinatorial problem is decomposed into a two-stage formulation solved by an integer L-shaped algorithm. The two stages are then executed online in the RDSS framework employing a sliding window method. The IEEE 39-bus system has been studied under normal and contingency conditions to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed online RDSS.

Reliability-based assessment of climatic adaptation for the increased resiliency of power distribution systems subjected to hurricanes

Power distribution systems are vulnerable to hurricanes as has been documented in recent years. Hurricane intensity or/and frequency may change as a result of increased CO2 emissions. This paper proposes six climatic adaptation strategies for timber distribution poles that may aid in mitigating the hurricane damage costs that may be expected to increase because of global climate change. The effectiveness of adaptation is assessed through a life-cycle cost analysis, which includes direct cost (e.g. cost of pole replacement, maintenance, and adaptation) and indirect cost (e.g. cost of power outage to customers). The viability of the adaptation strategies is examined considering three CO2 emission scenarios. Furthermore, the scenario of no climate change is considered in this paper to show the applicability the proposed framework for hurricane risk mitigation under current conditions (i.e. wind speeds remain stationary). This paper finds that certain adaptation measures can effectively reduce costs, resulting in more resilient power distribution systems.

Analysis on Special Protection Scheme of Korea Electric Power System by Fully Utilizing STATCOM in a Generation Side

Increase in power demand has required providing infrastructure, such as huge power plants and transmission lines. However, the recent trends in power system planning and operation are being toward maximum utilization of existing electricity infrastructure with tight operating margins because of new constraints placed by economic, political, and environmental issues. This might cause serious stability problems when a severe fault or a sudden outage of critical lines occurs. Therefore, the special protection scheme (SPS) has been used by generator tripping and successive load shedding to prevent a large-scale blackout by the cascading effect. If the number of tripping generators in the SPS operation is reduced, the enormous cost of power outage can be saved. This paper analyzes the enhancement of SPS via the transient stability improvement by the static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) applied to a generation side of Korea electric power system. First, its characteristic related to the SPS is described. Then, the proper capacity of STATCOM is determined with the equal area criterion to reduce the number of tripping generators. Also, the new control method for STATCOM is proposed for its full utilization. Finally, its effectiveness is verified by the case study with the practical data of Korea electric power system.

Estimation of power outage costs in the industrial sector of South Korea

This study estimates the power outage costs of the industrial sector by not only considering production loss but also the customer's inconvenience and various damages. For the estimation, we used a Type II Tobit model with firm-level survey data for 430 firms, and considered factors affecting the outage cost such as outage duration, average annual sales, and average monthly electricity consumption, among others. In addition, we analyzed the effect of the preannouncement of a rolling blackout on outage cost savings, and also examined the value of an emergency generator. From the estimation results, we found that the estimated outage cost is 1.24–1.3 times greater than the simple value of lost load (VoLL), and this difference increases when companies have emergency generator. The commercial and public service sector can reduce the outage cost the most compared to other sectors when a preannouncement is provided, and operating emergency generators can lower the outage cost in these sectors. Finally, we confirm that South Korea's rolling blackout in the predetermined order by the industry is appropriate to minimize the outage costs for the national economy when the outage is preannounced, but is not appropriate when there is no preannouncement.

Front Lines Against the Darkness: Enhancing the Resilience of the Electricity Grid Through Microgrid Facilities

power grids are supposed to be fault-tolerant, but you doubt the premise when you consider daily outages in more populated parts of the world and more recent brownouts and blackouts globally. Power engineers have been pushing forward the frontiers of power systems, and the hard-fought battle against the darkness is supposed to have been won, but the struggle is by no means over. Indeed, the electricity grid today is faced more intensely with challenging issues concerning cyber and physical system security. The recent blackout in Turkey on 31 March 2015, which knocked out the transportation infrastructure in major cities, causing massive traffic jams, is a testimony to this claim. It also shut down vital services to thousands of offices for several hours, inflicting business and social losses (see Figure 1). Although widespread blackouts are regarded as low-probability events, they carry immense socioeconomic costs. In such events, the burden of responsibility often lies with extreme weather events, cascading failures, or similar low-probability, high-impact incidents. According to a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisors, severe weather is the major cause of power grid outages in the United States. Meanwhile, it is estimated that weather-related power outages cost the American economy more than US$300 billion between 2003 and 2012. The report calls for increased investment to enhance the resilience of the power grid against rising incidences of extreme weather such as thunderstorms, hurricanes, and blizzards predicted by climate models.

The effects of network regulation on electricity supply security: a European analysis

This paper analyzes the interactions of the regulation of distribution networks and electricity supply security. In particular, the hypothesis is tested that output-based regulatory frameworks, which implicitly take into account quality-of-supply-criteria, improve the level of reliability vis a vis purely incentive-based schemes. To do so, novel empirical evidence is analyzed based on a cross-country panel data set covering 27 countries for the period from 1999 to 2013. Regional heterogeneity and potential endogeneity are controlled for. We find that the introduction of output-based regulation, ceteris paribus, leads to reductions of the annual outage duration by 16.05 % on average when compared to incentive-based systems. Given the substantial economic costs of power outages, marginal reliability improvements have considerable economic effects, which can now be quantfied. In the, admittedly hypothetical, case that EU member states, who have not yet done so, were to implement quality-controlling regulation, macroeconomic benefits amount to 930 m. € p.a. The findings support the argument that the value of electricity supply security should be explicitly accounted for when revising regulatory regimes in the future and that investment and maintenance possibilities for regulated firms need to adequately reflect the economic benefits of high levels of service reliability.

Welfare implications of power rationing: An application to Germany

This study analyzes the economic consequences of power rationing at the level of German counties. Based on a common production function approach, it estimates the costs of power outages for firms and households in all counties and uses these estimates to derive hypothetical rationing plans for the scenario of a country-wide shortage of power supply. Rationing plans are introduced according to several criteria: a random-based approach, a criterion of total cost minimization, a criterion minimizing costs of the most affected region as well as a criterion minimizing the number of people affected. The implementation of each criterion is simulated for different times of the day. The spatial patterns of rationing prove to be heterogenous. Estimated cost structures differ to some extent as well. The results are discussed with regard to their enforceability in the context of the German energy transition.

Evaluation and Analysis of the Cost of Power Outage in Gwangyang Container Terminal

Evaluation and Analysis of the Cost of Power Outage in Gwangyang Container Terminal

When does unreliable grid supply become unacceptable policy? Costs of power supply and outages in rural India

Despite frequent blackouts and brownouts, extension of the central grid remains the Indian government׳s preferred strategy for the country׳s rural electrification policy. This study reports an assessment that compares grid extension with distributed generation (DG) alternatives, based on the subsidies they will necessitate, and costs of service interruptions that are appropriate in the rural Indian context. Using cross-sectional household expenditure data and region fixed-effects models, average household demand is estimated. The price elasticity of demand is found to be in the range of −0.3 to −0.4. Interruption costs are estimated based on the loss of consumer surplus due to reduced consumption of electric lighting energy that results from intermittent power supply. Different grid reliability scenarios are simulated. Despite the inclusion of interruption costs, standalone DG does not appear to be competitive with grid extension at distances of less than 17km. However, backing up unreliable grid service with local DG plants is attractive when reliability is very poor, even in previously electrified villages. Introduction of energy efficient lighting changes these economics, and the threshold for acceptable grid unreliability significantly reduces. A variety of polices to promote accelerated deployment and the wider adoption of improved end-use efficiency, warrant serious consideration.

Performance evaluation and economic analysis of a gas turbine power plant in Nigeria

In this study, performance evaluation and economic analysis (in terms of power outage cost due to system downtime) of a gas turbine power plant in Nigeria have been carried out for the period 2001–2010. The thermal power station consists of nine gas turbine units with total capacity of 301MW (9×31.5MW). The study reveals that 64.3% of the installed capacity was available in the period. The percentage of shortfall of energy generated in the period ranged from 4.18% to 14.53% as against the acceptable value of 5–10%. The load factor of the plant is between 20.8% and 78.2% as against international best practice of 80%. The average availability of the plant for the period was about 64% as against industry best practice of 95%, while the average use factor was about 92%. The capacity factor of the plant ranged from 20.8% to 78.23% while the utilization factor ranged from 85.47% to 95.82%. For the ten years under review, there was energy generation loss of about 35.7% of expected energy generation of 26.411TWh with consequent plant performance of 64.3%. The study further reveals that the 35.7% of generation loss resulted in revenue loss of about M$251 (approximately b▪40). The simple performance indicator developed to evaluate the performance indices and outage cost for the station can also be applicable to other power stations in Nigeria and elsewhere. Measures to improve the performance indices of the plant have been suggested such as training of operation and maintenance (O & M) personnel regularly, improvement in O & M practices, proper spare parts inventory and improvement in general housekeeping of the plant. From technical point of view, performance of the plant can be improved by retrofitting with a gas turbine air inlet cooling system, heat recovery system or adding modifications (inter-cooling or regeneration) to the simple gas turbine units.

Estimating Power Outage Costs Based on a Survey of Industrial Customers

SummaryThousands of factories in Japan responded to a survey on power outage costs for industrial customers. From across the country, 5139 facilities designated as energy management factories answered questions about their power consumption and the loss of production value due to a hypothetical hour‐long power outage on a summer weekday. Using their responses, we estimated the median unit cost of a power outage across all sectors to be 672 yen/kWh. The service sector of amusement and hobbies and the manufacturing sector that makes electronic information and communication equipment have relatively high unit costs for power outages. The direct cost of damage from a specified power outage across all sectors totaled 77 billion yen. Using input–output analysis, we estimated the indirect damage costs caused by the repercussions of halting production. Indirect damages across all sectors totaled 91 billion yen. The wholesale and retail trade sector had the largest direct damage costs, while the transportation equipment manufacturing sector has the largest indirect damage costs. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 185(4): 25–32, 2013; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.22306

Global warming intensifies need for grid modernization

The economic cost of weather-related power outages is growing and requires action, says a new report.

The Research Status and the Development Trend of Protection in DC Distribution Power System

DC distribution power system has the characteristics of high power quality, high transmission capacity and low power outages cost, and can adapt to multi-point access to distributed generation. It will become a new direction in the field of distribution power system. This paper focuses on the research status and development trend of the DC distribution power system protection and control technology, and summarizes the protection and control technology, which are necessary to be carried out in the future research.

Power Outage Cost Evaluation: Reasoning, Methods and an Application

This paper analyses different assessment techniques used for power outage costs evaluation. Socio-economic analyses to quantify the effects of power cuts are essential for energy policy and to provide a rationale for investments in electricity supply security enhancing measures. Different analytical approaches are presented. An application of these assessment options provides insights in the macroeconomic value of electricity supply security. This is an essential input in the current discussion of grid extensions and investments in renewable energy sources. The applied analysis tool for the simulation of different power outage scenarios is available for download and enables policy makers to base decisions on the ground of the economic dimension of electricity supply security.