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.
"For several years now, we've been working with utilities to understand the economic impacts of both short- and long-duration power outages. The partnerships have led to the development of valuable, publicly available tools that are helping build the case for billions of dollars in new utility investments in jurisdictions across the country."
— Peter Larsen
Recent highlights of the work include an update to Berkeley Lab's Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator, a public website that allows 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 state-of-the-art method that will allow users to estimate the costs of widespread, long-duration (longer than 24 hours) power interruptions.
"For several years now, we've been working with utilities to understand the economic impacts of both short- and long-duration power outages," said Peter Larsen, staff scientist and research deputy for the Energy Analysis and Environmental Impacts Division at Berkeley Lab. "The partnerships have led to the development of valuable, publicly available tools that are helping build the case for billions of dollars in new utility investments in jurisdictions across the country."
Berkeley Lab's ICE Calculator estimates costs of short-duration power outages
Utilities have found the ICE Calculator and its ability to estimate short-term outage costs so useful that several have joined a public-private partnership with Berkeley Lab and research partners at Resource Innovations to refresh the tool's data and update it.
"The ICE Calculator at Berkeley Lab is a key tool for helping the Office of Electricity achieve its reliability and affordability goals for the electricity grid," said Gil Bindewald, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Electricity at the U.S. Department of Energy. "Strengthening grid reliability is one of Energy Secretary Wright's departmental priorities, and this tool will help guide investments for electric utilities to avoid power outages. This not only helps to ensure the lights stay on for businesses and consumers, but will also help utilities to continue to safeguard our nation's grid, which is a priority for President Trump."
"This project has resulted in the most comprehensive and detailed estimate yet of the costs of power outages," Larsen said. "For example, the ICE Calculator estimates that a single, 24-hour-long power outage impacting all electricity customers in Texas could cost households and businesses tens of billions of dollars."
ICE Calculator 2.0 also features design and functionality improvements, making it easier to use. The newly 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."
Berkeley Lab's Power Outage Economics Tool evaluates economic impacts of widespread, long-duration power outages
In the Nature Communications study, Larsen and colleagues worked with Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the largest utility in Illinois, to estimate the economic impacts of widespread, long-duration (WLD) power interruptions - those that last anywhere from an entire day to two weeks. This research complements the ICE Calculator, which is focused on the costs of localized power outages lasting up to 24 hours.
Berkeley Lab researchers began by asking households and businesses across ComEd's service area how they would respond to power outages affecting their entire county and lasting many days. For example, when faced with a multi-day outage, would residential customers stay home? Use backup power? Relocate temporarily? 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 then 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 that were without power and indirect impacts on those in the surrounding areas that still had power.
Estimating these economic impacts has been a persistent challenge, Larsen noted. There are two approaches to estimate impacts of power outages - surveys and modeling - and each comes with its own pluses and minuses.
"The research breakthrough is that we took the best of both approaches," he said. "This hybrid method, which involves using survey data to inform economic modeling, improves the accuracy of the estimates and can help value major investments in the power system to improve reliability and security."
The team found that widespread, extended power outages take a heavy toll on ComEd's service territory. Power interruptions of one, three, and 14 days could 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.
"As a utility serving more than four million customers, ComEd is keenly aware of the rapidly evolving risk environment," said Dale Player, Vice President, Engineering & Smart Grid. "POET provides us with a basis for understanding how customers and the economy are impacted by widespread and long-duration interruptions. This understanding is critical to our ability to make targeted improvements to the grid, increasing resiliency for our customers."
The techniques developed for this study can be applied anywhere in the country.
Funding sources and partners
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, Inc. 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, Inc., 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.
