Environmental and socio-economic consequences of a shortage in installed generating capacity. Final report
This report describes an initial, major step in laying the foundation for a comprehensive, integrated methodology with which to cost the environmental and socioeconomic consequences of electricity shortages. The work reported here brings this sense of structure and definition to the problem, and focuses primarily upon measuring the impacts of electricity outages for certain classes of customers. These outages may be system-imposed, utility-imposed or customer-imposed, and may derive from underlying insufficiencies either in installed capacity or primary energy availability. Moreover, investments can be made and operating policies and procedures implemented to directly influence the level of realized system reliability, thereby altering this likelihood of outage. These actions can entail considerable societal cost and must, therefore, along with the costs of actual outages, be integrated into the overall system planning calculus. This on-going planning process seeks to minimize the total societal cost of providing adequate, reliable service to the various classes of electricity consumers. Each of the measures for improving power system reliability has associated with it tangible costs which must be simultaneously weighed against each other; the costs of outage; and the costs of system expansion, power pooling options, investment in fuel stockpiles and the myriad of other near, mid and long term alternatives confronting the utility planner. This report details the methodologies developed to quantify the impacts of outages of varying magnitude and duration which arise with no warning in both the residential and industrial sectors at various times of the day and seasons of the year. The results are most interesting, and it is concluded that the feasibility of validly quantifying the predominant environmental and socio-economic consequences of outages has been convincingly confirmed.
- Research Organization:
- Mathtech, Inc., Princeton, NJ (USA); ICF, Inc., Washington, DC (USA)
- OSTI ID:
- 5159993
- Report Number(s):
- EPRI-EA-2462; ON: DE82906450
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: Portions of document are illegible
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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