The value of electricity reliability: Evidence from battery adoption

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Brown, David P.; Muehlenbachs, Lucija
• 署名单位: University of Alberta; University of Calgary; Resources for the Future
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2024.105216
• 发表日期: 2024
• 关键词: Batteries; reliability; Averting expenditures; Power outages; Value of lost load

摘要

To avoid electric-infrastructure-induced wildfires, millions of Californians had their power cut for hours to days at a time. We show that rooftop solar-plus-battery-storage systems increased in zip codes with the longest power outages. Rooftop solar panels alone will not help a household avert outages, but a solar-plus-battery-storage system will. Using this fact, we obtain a revealed-preference estimate of the willingness to pay for electricity reliability, the Value of Lost Load, a key parameter for electricity market design. Our estimate, with an average of $4,980/MWh, suggests California's wildfire-prevention outages resulted in losses from foregone consumption of $406 million to residential electricity consumers.