A group of university researchers and Alaska Power & Telephone are hoping residents and business owners will fill out a survey they say will help all parties better understand how electrical outages affect customers.
The survey asks respondents to imagine scenarios where a natural disaster leaves homes and communities without power for a week to a month at a time and questions what economic impacts they would suffer as a result, along with how prepared they would be if such an outage occurred.
The research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Transitions Initiative. Jennifer Schmidt, University of Alaska Anchorage professor of natural resource management and economic research, said the results will be used to make recommendations for the best investments that power companies can make to help reduce the impacts of outages on their customers. Residents in Tok, Haines, Skagway and Craig are being asked to take the survey.
“There’s been no survey that’s been done in Alaska that’s tried to look at economic effects of power outages. It’s also being done in Guam,” Schmidt said. “It will be used to identify the economic costs of power outages, ways in which people are or are not resilient to power outages and make recommendations for investments or things residents can do to reduce the effects of power outages.”
Schmidt said the questions are also designed to get people thinking about how to be prepared in the case of a short- or long-term power outage.
“It gets people thinking about their vulnerabilities and how to reduce their vulnerabilities,” she said.
Researchers are also looking at other non-economic impacts such as inconvenience, loss of goodwill among customers and liability from natural disasters and power interruptions.
Separate from those questions, AP&T is also using the survey to gauge customers’ willingness to pay 30% more in power costs if the company would transition to 100% renewable energy sources.
UAA, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, Northern Arizona University and the Argonne National Laboratory are all working with AP&T in the effort.
The survey takes about half an hour to complete and can be found at https://tinyurl.com/aptoutagesurvey. Residential participants will be entered into a $250 sweepstake upon completion of the survey.
The questionnaire deadline has been extended until the end of February. Schmidt said they’re hoping to garner a 30% participation rate. As of Tuesday, 74 residents completed the survey; they’re hoping for a total of 150. She added that they’re hoping 38 businesses complete the survey. So far, four have completed it.
Schmidt said researchers will share the results with AP&T and discuss how to disseminate the findings with communities.