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The value of electricity reliability: Evidence from battery adoption

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  • Brown, David P.
  • Muehlenbachs, Lucija

Abstract

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.

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  • Brown, David P. & Muehlenbachs, Lucija, 2024. "The value of electricity reliability: Evidence from battery adoption," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 239(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:239:y:2024:i:c:s004727272400152x
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2024.105216
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    Keywords

    Batteries; Reliability; Averting expenditures; Power outages; Value of lost load;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q40 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - General
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy

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