Climate change has caused an increase in extreme weather events, resulting in more frequent power outages. The economic burden of these interruptions, estimated at over $150 billion annually in the U.S., represents a significant and increasingly relevant cost of climate change. Utilities and policymakers must understand the magnitude of interruption costs and which customers are most impacted by outages. To allow stakeholders to estimate these costs, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Resource Innovations (RI) are collaborating on a nationwide study to modernize the Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator.

 

The ICE Calculator, originally developed by LBNL and RI in 2009 and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, is the only publicly-available tool for estimating customer costs of power interruptions. LBNL and RI will utilize modernized surveys, new econometric modeling, and a large, diverse customer sample from utilities across the U.S. to evaluate the impact of power outages.