Distributed nature of residential customer outage costs

Reliability worth assessment is an important factor in power system planning and operation. An equally important issue is how to use customer costs of electric supply interruptions as surrogates to appropriately quantify reliability worth. Postal or in-person surveys of electric customers are often used to determine interruption costs. The results obtained from the surveys are transformed into customer damage functions which are applicable to individual customer classes and sectors. Standard customer damage functions use aggregate or average customer costs for selected outage durations. This paper develops a practical alternative to the customer damage function method of describing the interruption cost data. The alternate technique, which is designated as the probability distribution approach, is capable of recognizing the dispersed nature of the data. The proposed probability distribution method is illustrated in this paper using the interruption cost data collected in a 1991 survey of the Canadian residential sector.