Estimating what US residential customers are willing to pay for resilience to large electricity outages of long duration

Abstract

Ethics oversightCarnegie Mellon Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved the survey experiment. Informed consent was provided to all survey respondents before they started the survey.Note that full information on the approval of the study protocol must also be provided in the manuscript.

Future Prospects of Direct Air Capture Technologies: Insights From an Expert Elicitation Survey

“…In this paper, we report the results of an elicitation of 18 experts in negative emissions and direct air capture technologies and the economic and policy issues. Expert elicitation studies have been widely used to gauge uncertainty surrounding the future costs of various energy technologies (Wiser et al, 2016;Anadon et al, 2017;Thomas et al, 2017;Baik et al, 2020). Our survey was designed to elicit information about DAC technologies' future in two future scenarios of climate change policies; policy as usual (PAU) and a stringent climate policy consistent with the 2 • C target (2DC).…”

Storage Futures Study: Distributed Solar and Storage Outlook: Methodology and Scenarios

“…7 The LBNL report contains customer interruption costs per event by season, time of day, day of week, and geographical regions within the United States. We use that report as our main source of data and compare it with customer willingness-to-pay data from other studies to ensure consistency Baik et al 2020;.…”

A hybrid approach to estimating the economic value of power system resilience

“…However, surveys suffer from several well-known limitations, including the inability to estimate the full economic impact from longer-duration interruptions affecting larger geographic areas. First, electricity customers may have difficulties in providing precise interruption cost estimates for WLD power interruptions if there is no adequate assistance for respondents to fully consider the various aspects of the consequences they may suffer (Baik, Davis, and Morgan, 2018;Baik et al, 2020). Second, electricity customers may not be fully aware of the cascading consequences of power interruptions throughout supply chains.…”

“…The segmentation of electricity customers is coincidental with the original purpose of CIC surveys, which was to establish the value of reliability for customer classes in utilities.6 There are a few value of lost load studies using different elicitation strategies, including discrete choice experiments (for instance,Layton and Moeltner (2005)). Although discrete choice experiments are well-suited for estimating customers' preferences for electric service reliability, they are not well-suited for assessing the costs of power interruptions, especially for WLD power interruptions, because 1) individuals' preferences for resilient electric services are uncertain and incomplete, so it is difficult to use a single cardinal utility function to express their preferences for complex and unfamiliar alternatives; 2) studies need to abstract away significantly from what will actually happen during a power interruption because the method requires many repeated choices from respondents, taking time away from helping respondents understand the time dynamics of lost electricity-dependent services; 3) respondents' value of resilient electric services is determined by many factors, and the differences among people will be washed out by aggregating over individuals; and, 4) testing axioms of probabilistic discrete choice models, for example stochastic transitivity and quadruple condition, requires many repeated pairwise comparisons(Boxall et al, 1996;Davis-Stober, 2009;De La Maza et al, 2018;Baik et al, 2019;Baik et al, 2020).…”