Customer attitudes regarding electric outage costs and back-up generation
- Pacific Gas and Electric Co., San Francisco, CA (US)
A market research project was conducted to determine: 1) if a substantial market exists for PGandE to sell, operate and/or maintain back-up generators for a profit, and 2) if the estimated outage costs predicted in a previous Value of Service mail survey (VOSS) were indicative of the investment customers would make to avoid outages. The results showed that when a more detailed investigation occurred on-site with customers who had indicated perceived outage costs exceeding the costs of owning and maintaining a back-up generator (approximately $30/kw-year), outage costs estimates were substantially lower and dropped to $0 in 40% of the cases. Customers had difficulty quantifying effects of hypothetical outages, and most customers expect no future outages, even though outages occurred regularly in the past. Future studies on the value of reliability should attempt to blend costs of an actual outage with costs for a hypothetical outage. Even with added monetary incentives from curtailable/interruptible load management rates, customers cited numerous impediments to generator investment. Due to the limited interest in back-up generation from customers with relatively high outage costs, there does not appear to be a large market for new sales at this time.
- OSTI ID:
- 6495681
- Journal Information:
- IEEE Trans. Power Syst.; (United States), Vol. 3:4
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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