Outage Costs, Energy Resilience, and Equity

Across California, 4.4 million households face an energy affordability gap totaling $4.1 billion dollars, where energy costs in each household are greater than 8.5 percent of their net income. If the costs of dealing with power outages are added, another $900 million dollars in resilient energy affordability gap emerges, adding another 0.5 million impacted households. While the energy gap is emerging as an equity and affordability metric for energy policy decision making, considerations of resilient energy affordability gaps are so far lacking. Here we provide a method to measure the affordability gap incurred by a lack of resilient energy, using similar methods as those established for energy affordability analyses to account for equity in outage impact analysis.