Economic analysis of outage costs parameters and their implications on investment decisions

In this paper economic analysis of investment decisions and outage costs is given. The methods to determine outage costs in distribution company´s viewpoint are presented. The effects of regulation are taken into account in cost valuating process. The paper also present methods to compose interruption costs using actual interruption data and customer interruption costs (CIC) of Finnish distribution business. The methods make it possible to define outage costs even if there is no customer-specific interruption statistics available. Examples from actual network are presented when outage costs are modeled using secondary substation-specific, company-specific or nationwide cost parameters.