Economic cost of non-supply

Considerable attention has been directed throughout the world to assessing the economic consequences to electric energy customers of failures in electricity supply. The primary thrust in these studies has been to obtain a quantitative appreciation of the worth of electric energy supply in order to create a balance between reliability cost and reliability worth. The cost of an interruption from the customer's perspective is related to the nature of the degree to which the activities interrupted are dependent on electricity. In turn, this dependency is a function of both customer and interruption characteristics. The impact of an outage is also partially dependent on the attitude and preparedness of customers, which in turn are related to existing reliability levels. Issues that can be important include how widespread is the interruption; its cause; and its predictability.