Calculation of Residential Interruption Costs caused by Adverse Weather using Monte Carlo Methods

The main contribution of this paper is a residential interruption cost model that aims to capture households? inconvenience due to power outages caused by adverse weather. Commonly, the customer interruption cost is modelled to be a function of the outage duration. However, other factors also affect the interruption cost. For example, the cost for a household increases if public services also are affected by the outage. The number of public services that a household cannot use is often correlated to the total number of customers affected by the outage. This relationship is explored in the proposed cost model in order to consider the impact of widespread and long-lasting outages caused by, for example, adverse weather. An adverse weather model gives wind and ice loads. These loads in combination with a vulnerability model for components in a transmission system and a restoration time model give the outage duration. In a case study, the impact of adverse weather on a meshed test system with residential customers is studied using Monte Carlo simulations. It is concluded that more surveys investigating the increased costs for households due to long-lasting and widespread outages are needed.