Case study

A Western US electricity utility

Understanding how customers value reliability in electricity systems

PA designed a study to calculate two measures of the value of service reliability. One measure was based on the direct costs customers incur during an outage; the second was based on what customers are willing to pay to avoid an outage. PA designed and tested different versions of the survey instrument, and directed the completion of telephone and mail surveys with 2,200 residential and small-to-medium business customers, as well as on-site personal interviews with 200 large commercial and industrial customers.