An Activity-based Interruption Cost Model for Households to be Used in Cost-Benefit Analysis

This paper develops an interruption cost model for households that, as well as outage duration uses activity patterns, outdoor temperature and daylight to describe the impact of different electrical power outages. For households the interruption costs usually measure the inconvenience associated with interrupted activities and uncomfortable indoor temperature due to the outage. Further, the model also captures the large variations in interruption costs for identical outages among households. The model is applied to a test system, and using a Monte Carlo technique the total interruption cost is studied. The results imply that both the time of occurrence and the distributed nature of residential interruption costs have a significant impact on ECOST.