The High Cost of Substandard PQ
Staff -- Consulting-Specifying Engineer, 3/1/2002
The Consortium for Electric Infrastructure to Support a Digital Society (CEIDS)—a program put together by the Electric Power Research Institute—claims that the annual cost of outages and other power-quality disturbances is running at more than $119 billion.
CEIDS researchers studied close to 1,000 firms in three economic sectors that are particularly sensitive to power disturbances: digital businesses (data processing, data storage, Internet hotels); continuous process manufacturing (chemicals, petroleum, paper); and fabrication and essential services (including manufacturing, non-electric utilities and transportation).
These three areas are said to represent 40% of U.S. gross domestic product, with roughly two million companies involved in one of these sectors. Together, they lose $45.7 billion to outages and another $6.7 billion to power-quality problems every year.
Regionally, California showed the highest losses, between $13 billion and $20 billion per year—even without rolling blackouts. Other states with high economic losses to power problems were Texas ($8 to $13 billion) and New York ($8 to $12 billion).
Industrial and digital firms lose an average of $1,477 during a one-second outage, according to the study, $2,107 for a three-minute outage and $7,795 during a one-hour outage. These companies report that 49% of the outages they experience last less than three minutes.
Further information can be found at the CEID web site: http://ceids.epri.com
From Pure Power, Spring 2002.
