A comparison of direct worth and relative worth studies for outage cost estimations in industry sectors

The estimation of customer interruption costs is a challenging task. Understanding the true economic impacts of unwanted power interruptions is a must for planning purposes and for the decision making on electric energy policies. All methodologies that have been adopted to analyze the problem have strong and weak points. This paper presents the outage cost estimations for the small and medium scale industry sector, public sector and service sector customers in Finland by the aid of a customer survey study. The direct worth approach and the relative worth approach are applied for the industry sector customers and the results are compared. The results of public and service sector customers are presented by following the direct worth methodology only.