Customer attitudes regarding electric outage costs and back-up generation

A market research project was conducted to determine whether: a substantial market exists for PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) to sell, operate, and/or maintain backup generators for a profit, and the estimated outage costs predicted in a previous value-of-service mail survey (VOSS) were indicative of the investment customers would make to avoid outages. The results showed that, when a more detailed investigation was performed on-site with customers who had indicated perceived outage costs exceeding the costs of owning and maintaining a back-up generator (approximately $30/kW-yr), outage costs estimates were substantially lower and dropped to $0 in 40% of the cases. It is concluded that customers had difficulty quantifying effects of hypothetical outages, and most customers expect no future outages, even though outages occurred regularly in the past