Power outages and other power quality disturbances are costing the US economy more than $119 billion each year according to a study sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). The study, The Cost of Power Disturbances to Industrial and Digital Economy Companies, highlights these industries’ growing need for what it calls digital quality electricity.
The study involved interviews with a statistically representative sample of 985 firms in three sectors of the US economy that represent 40 per cent of the US gross domestic product. The three sectors were digital businesses, continuous process manufacturing (such as paper, chemicals and petroleum) and fabrication and essential services. It was conducted by EPRI affiliate Primen with an initial literature review carried out by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
On a national scale around 2 million establishments in all three sectors collectively lose $45.7 billion each year to outages and a further $6.7 billion to power quality disturbances such as voltage sags. An unprotected microprocessor may malfunction if its power is interrupted for even one quarter of an ac cycle, the report says. Even so, the digital businesses actually showed the lowest losses of the three groups, partly because they are already make a practice of implementing measures to improve power quality.
The study also broke down the figures by state. It revealed that Californian companies experience the highest costs in the nation, both for power outages and power quality disturbances. Texas and New York were the second and third most affected states.
The report was commissioned under EPRI’s Consortium for Electric Infrastructure to Support a Digital Society. This was launched earlier this year as a collaborative research effort to design the technologies required to improve the existing infrastructure in ways necessary to the changing demands of digital equipment.
