Integrating customer interruption costs into outage management systems

Abstract

Utilities have increasingly been applying customer interruption costs to reliability and resiliency planning, using tools such as the Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator. Furthermore, applications of value-based reliability planning can be found in the industry and academic literature for generation, transmission and distribution planning and at the federal policy-making level. With the wealth of guidance documentation and planning examples that is now available, the utility industry is positioned to further expand upon the application of value-based reliability planning by integrating customer interruption costs into outage management systems (OMS) and their associated business processes. This paper summarizes how (and why) to integrate customer interruption costs into OMS and discusses how utilities can act on customer interruption cost information to provide more value to customers.