Whitepaper
August 18, 2003
Economic Cost of the August 14th 2003 Northeast Power Outage: Preliminary Estimate
Published by The Brattle Group, Inc.
Placing a dollar value on electric service reliability is nothing new to the electric power industry. Electric utilities recognize that when the lights go out, critical social services are disrupted and great inconveniences can occur to businesses and individuals. Electric utilities have studied the value that their customers place on electric service reliability since the early 1970s. In fact, many utilities are required to provide such estimates of electric service “reliability” to their state commissions prior to investing in their own transmission and distribution systems.
