Regional Analysis of the Economic Impact of Electricity Outages in US Healthcare Facilities

In recent times it has become increasingly relevant to appropriately identify and quantify the economic impacts resulting from power grid outages. This paper investigates the annual direct economic effects of electricity outages in outpatient and inpatient healthcare facilities across all US states and the District of Columbia. To achieve this with the appropriate data granularity, the authors adopted a combination of traditional metrics and methods, including the Production Function method for calculating the Value of Lost Load. The results show that electricity outages have a low to moderate economic impact in US outpatient and inpatient healthcare facilities, being that this impact is significantly more relevant in the latter case. It is also higher in facilities located in eastern and southern US states, where natural disasters are prevalent. Nonetheless, the economic impact from outages can also be driven by external market or grid performance factors, such as in the cases of California and West Virginia.