Assessment of power interruption costs for the industrial customers in Greece

Two important economical aspects associated with justifying new facilities, quality and reliability of the electrical power systems are the costs and worth of reliability. The key indicators of this worth are the customer interruption costs which are best and most definitely derived from estimates of perceived costs and losses due to interruptions in their electrical power supply. The customer surveys are mainly utilized to determine these interruption costs. Such a customer survey approach was conducted by the Power Systems Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens in order to assess the interruption cost for all the different sectors of power customers in Greece. The paper presents the results that were obtained from the survey in the industrial sector during 1997. These results mainly include the interruption cost data and their variation according to the various characteristics of the interruption events and the power supply customers together with a comparison with the respective data published for other countries.