Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are partnering with electric utilities across the country to create more accurate cost estimates for both short- and long-term power outages, building tools to guide investments in grid reliability.
The highlights of the work include an update to Berkeley Lab’s Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator, a public website allowing stakeholders to estimate the costs of localized, shorter duration (up to 24 hours) power interruptions, and a newly published study in the journal Nature Communications featuring the Power Outage Economics Tool (POET), a method allowing users to estimate the costs of long-duration (longer than 24 hours) power interruptions.
ICE Calculator and its ability to estimate short-term outage costs is useful and several utilities have joined a public-private partnership with Berkeley Lab and research partners at Resource Innovations to refresh the tool’s data and update it.
ICE Calculator 2.0 features design and functionality improvements to be used easily. The updated tool is accompanied by a comprehensive technical report on the update activities. As the initiative progresses, more information will be added into the tool to increase the accuracy and applicability of the results.
“This project is a great example of a public-private partnership to accomplish a common goal. Berkeley Lab’s ICE Calculator 2.0 update will allow American Electric Power (AEP) and other stakeholders to better understand the true economic costs of power interruptions,” said Bob Bradish, Interim Transmission President at AEP. “AEP looks forward to using this tool to evaluate and substantiate investments in the grid that will benefit our customers.”
In the Nature Communications study, Larsen and colleagues worked with Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), to estimate the economic impacts of widespread, long-duration (WLD) power interruptions. The research supports the ICE Calculator, which is focused on the costs of localized power outages lasting up to 24 hours.
Berkeley Lab researchers asked households and businesses across ComEd’s service area on their response to power outages affecting the entire county and lasting many days. For businesses, the questions centered on impacts on production and inventory, costs to restart operations, and mitigating behaviors, such as renting backup generation or moving production to another facility that has power.
The researchers used the survey results to calibrate a regional economic model, called the Power Outage Economics Tool (POET), to estimate the economic impact of widespread, multi-day outages across the entire region consisting of the counties surrounding the ComEd service territory in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. The estimates included direct impacts on customers without power and indirect impacts on those in the surrounding areas having power.
The team found that extended power outages blow ComEd’s service territory. Power interruptions of one, three, and 14 days is predicted to reduce the ComEd territory’s gross domestic product by $1.8 billion (1.3%), $3.7 billion (2.6%), and $15.2 billion (10.4%), respectively.
DOE’s Office of Electricity provided seed funding to develop the ICE Calculator 2.0 public-private partnership, and utilities provided direct support to Berkeley Lab. Researchers at Berkeley Lab partnered with Resource Innovations to update the ICE Calculator.
ComEd provided funding to Berkeley Lab for the Power Outage Economics Tool project. Berkeley Lab collaborated with researchers at Resource Innovations, Boston University, and the University of Southern California to estimate the economic impacts of widespread, long-duration power outages as described in the paper published in Nature Communications.
