Projecting future costs to U.S. electric utility customers from power interruptions

Peter H. Larsen, Brent Boehlert, Joseph Eto, Kristina Hamachi-LaCommare, Jeremy Martinich and Lisa Rennels

Energy, 2018, vol. 147, issue C, 1256-1277

Abstract: This analysis integrates regional models of power system reliability, output from atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, and results from the Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator to project long-run costs to electric utility customers from power interruptions under different future severe weather and electricity system scenarios. We discuss the challenges when attempting to model long-run costs to utility customers including the use of imperfect metrics to measure severe weather. Despite these challenges, initial findings show that discounted cumulative customer costs, through the middle of the century, could range from $1.5-$3.4 trillion ($2015) without aggressive undergrounding of the power system and increased utility operations and maintenance (O&M) spending and $1.5-$2.5 trillion with aggressive undergrounding and increased spending. By the end of the century, cumulative customer costs could range from $1.9-$5.6 trillion (without aggressive undergrounding and increased spending) and $2.0-$3.6 trillion (with aggressive undergrounding and increased spending). We find that, in some scenarios, aggressive undergrounding of distribution lines and increased O&M spending is not always cost-effective. We conclude by identifying important topics for follow-on research, which have the potential to improve the cost estimates of this model.

Keywords: Electric system reliability; Grid resilience; Power outages; Outage cost; Severe weather; Undergrounding; Q4 energy; Q5 environmental economics; R00 general; O2 development planning and policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544217321242
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:energy:v:147:y:2018:i:c:p:1256-1277

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2017.12.081

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().