Berkeley Lab and Resource Innovations have partnered to modernize an online tool designed to estimate the economic costs of power interruptions in support of utilities, policymakers and other stakeholders looking to enhance the U.S. power system’s reliability and resilience.
The public-private partnership will survey customers of sponsoring utilities, analyze the responses and use that data to fully update and upgrade the publicly available Interruption Cost Estimate Calculator.
The tool currently uses information from over 100,000 U.S. customer responses from 34 utility-sponsored surveys dated from 1989 and 2012. The planned updates will draw data from clients of American Electric Power, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, DTE Energy, Exelon and National Grid, among other sponsoring utilities.
“The ICE Calculator is an important tool that electric companies can utilize as they work with regulators and policymakers to plan the investments needed to provide affordable, reliable, secure and resilient clean electricity to customers,” said Phil Moeller, executive vice president of the business operations group and regulatory affairs at EEI.
He added that modernizing ICE Calculator would help stakeholders conduct better assess,ents of the benefits of energy grid resilience investments.
The tool’s initial development was funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity.