Residential customer outage cost valuation for urban areas in Nepal

Utilities in most of the developing countries do not possess relevant information to evaluate the electricity supply outage cost incurred by the customers. This paper shows the significance of customer survey techniques to evaluate customer outage cost in developing countries in the era of restructuring and globalization. Residential customer surveys that are extensively used by utilities in the developed countries can not be directly adopted in developing countries. Relevant modifications that incorporate customer behaviour in the rapidly changing socio-economic characteristics in those nations must be adequately addressed. The results obtained using customer survey techniques are consistent with the figures anticipated and also indicate toward the need to carry out such surveys for other customer categories as well. The survey questionnaire is designed to obtain customer information to have uninterrupted power supply based on their willingness to pay (WTP), alternative actions and willingness to accept (WTA) monetary compensation for agreeing frequent supply interruptions. The outage cost evaluation is carried out using least square error method by a computer program developed in MATLAB platform.