The High Cost of Substandard PQ

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 disturba...

By Staff March 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: https://ceids.epri.com

From Pure Power, Spring 2002.