Hydro-Quebec's survey on outage cost in industries

In 1989 Hydro-Quebec completed a survey on the cost of power interruptions to its industrial customers. A total of 11,000 firms formed the base of the survey, which was reduced to 1,647 for analysis purposes. The questionnaire was designed around the concept of representation of knowledge. The costs of various situations were inferred for every enterprise on the basis of knowledge obtained through the surveys. The results of the survey describe the variation in costs of interruption as a function of time of occurrence, duration and advance notice. These costs are expressed in terms of a reference case by the equivalent hourly cost. The magnitude of the cost of the reference interruption is designated the reference cost of undelivered energy. This paper describes the methodology of the survey but does not include survey results. 4 refs., 2 tabs