Survey and applications of interruption costs in large customers

The phenomena related to Power Quality, as the voltage dips, imbalances, harmonic distortion and interruptions can cause damage to equipment used in industries and commercial sector. As soon as an outage occurs caused by one of these phenomena, there may be costs of various kinds, like production lost and others. Although there are mechanisms of cost internalization, such as penalties, the real cost evaluation of interruption for large consumers depends necessarily on structured survey and statistical evaluation. This paper presents the results of a survey of this kind, applied on large industrial and commercial consumers served by AES Eletropaulo. To validate the results, the obtained interruption costs were compared with the actual costs of one industrial consumer.