Evaluation of customer interruption cost for reliability planning of power systems in developing economies

This paper focuses on the estimation of cost of power supply unreliability to commercial consumers in Punjab (India). There is an increasing need for efficient supply planning and optimal pricing of electricity. Rising costs and limited investment funds have led to deferrals in capacity enhancements in most of the developing economies of the world. The paper tries to emphasize the relation of reliability planning and value of quality and costs of outages based on demand behavior of commercial consumers. The outage costs can also be used for planning tariff structure, which at present is cross-subsidized and economically unviable in Punjab where the present study has been carried out.