Impact of Long Duration Planned Outages on Paper Mills: A Comparative Study of Three Paper Mills

Considerable attention has been directed throughout the world to assess the economic consequences to electric energy customers due to unreliable power supply. Due to complexity in cost patterns of industrial sector in comparison with residential and commercial sector, a very few studies were conducted in this sector. So, three Craft paper mills of medium scale in Ludhiana (Punjab) were selected as a practical case to conduct a study considering the years 2008 and 2009. Customer survey approach was adopted because the customer is in the best position to assess the effects of interruptions or outages and thus give help to calculate associated costs more accurately. The primary purpose of conducting this survey was to establish monetary losses associated with off-days and peak load imposed by electricity board in 2008 and 2009. The number of weekly off-days and peak load was analyzed accurately through circulars available on the official website of Punjab State electricity Board. The approach called Customer Damage Function (CDF) was used in this study. It includes two terms, one that ascribes a cost to the energy not supplied in Rs/kWh and one that ascribes a cost to the load disconnected. CDF was calculated for three paper mills which portray the costs associated with outages as a function of outage duration.