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The Value of Electricity Reliability: Evidence from Battery Adoption

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  • Brown, David B.
  • Muehlenbachs, Lucija

    (Resources for the Future)

Abstract

To avoid electric-infrastructure-induced wildfires, millions of Californians have 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, of around $4,300/MWh, suggests California's wildfires-prevention outages resulted in losses from foregone consumption of $322 million to residential electricity consumers.

Suggested Citation

  • Brown, David B. & Muehlenbachs, Lucija, 2023. "The Value of Electricity Reliability: Evidence from Battery Adoption," RFF Working Paper Series 23-10, Resources for the Future.
    • Handle: RePEc:rff:dpaper:dp-23-10
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    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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