The Costs of Power Interruptions in Germany: A Regional and Sectoral Analysis

Christian Growitsch, Raimund Malischek, Sebastian Nick and Heike Wetzel

German Economic Review, 2015, vol. 16, issue 3, 307-323

Abstract: type="main" xml:id="geer12054-abs-0001">

A high standard of security of electricity supply comes at serious electricity system costs. However, these system costs have to be balanced with the economic costs induced by an insecure supply of electricity. Following a macroeconomic approach, we analyze the economic costs imposed by potential power interruptions in Germany. Using an extensive dataset on industries and households, we estimate both Values of Lost Load and the associated hourly costs of power interruptions for different German regions and sectors. We find that interruption costs vary significantly over time, between sectors and regions. Peaking at midday on a Monday in December at 750 Mio € per hour, the average total national outage costs amount to approximately 430 Mio € per hour. A missing gigawatt hour creates average outage costs of about 7.6 Mio €.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/geer.2015.16.issue-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: The Costs of Power Interruptions in Germany: A Regional and Sectoral Analysis (2015)
Working Paper: The Costs of Power Interruptions in Germany - an Assessment in the Light of the Energiewende (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:germec:v:16:y:2015:i:3:p:307-323

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1465-6485

Access Statistics for this article

German Economic Review is currently edited by Bernhard Felderer, Joseph F. Francois, Ivo Welch, Urs Schweizer and David E. Wildasin

More articles in German Economic Review from Verein für Socialpolitik Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().