Comparison of the methods for assessing the customers' outage costs

This paper gives a comparative study of various methods for assessing the customers' outage costs. The methods considered are the willingness to pay in order to avoid an outage, the willingness to accept compensation for having had an outage, the customer survey where the costs are estimated directly by the customers themselves and an econometric model based on price elasticity. In the case of industrial customers, also the correlation between the outage costs and the value added by the production is examined. The use of different methods is illustrated by the main results of a large Nordic study, carried out in 1992 and 1993.