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Abstract
The electricity grid is one of sixteen critical infrastructure systems designated by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Grid reliability and resilience are vital to security. However, the impact of failures in grid reliability, such as large scale power outages is often limited to short term economic impact assessments. There is little identification, or synthesis of factors that determine impact severity, which prevents the true conceptualization of resilience in power systems. There is a need for a more complete impact assessment model that allows assessment of economic and social impacts of power outages beyond the initial failure event. The purpose of this paper is to identify and synthesize relevant information for the development of a preliminary power outage impact assessment model. A comprehensive impact assessment model can provide decision support information for prevention of, or impact reduction during power system failures. This may help policy makers understand the importance of investment in different areas of power systems and help in the diffusion of innovation that supports grid reliability and resilience.
Keywords
Power outage, resilience, economic impact, social impact
Introduction
Similar to natural disasters such as earthquakes, large scale power outages can have an adverse effect in the economy and social fabric of a community. However, the impact of failures in grid reliability, such as large scale power outages, is often limited to short term economic impact assessments. Despite their frequency of use, these economic assessments are not robust as they fail to account for changes in the economic measures due to different factors. Short term economic impact assessments are the source of information relied upon by policy makers and investors when developing policies and allocating resources towards improving the resilience of power system from destabilizing events. Although relatively rare in the United States, large scale cascading power outages has a substantial impact, and calls for an improved understanding of the risk of large scale blackouts (Newman, Carreras, Lynch, & Dobson, 2011). In order to help understand the importance of power outages and to move towards a better conceptualization of resilience in power systems, we need to understand the potential cost of power outage beyond the initial economic cost. This understanding can be brought about through a comprehensive impact assessment model that...