Abstract:
Power interruptions, outages and load shading are some of the challenges the
manufacturing industries in Ethiopia facing. In this paper the impact of power outages in
selected cement plants in Ethiopia is studied. The methodology employed in this paper
are Direct output loss and other losses using company‗s four years data (2016 to 2019)
record data and Indirect method using willingness to pay by choice experiment method to
measure the cost imposed by power outages. Estimating the true opportunity costs to the
enterprises using decision matrix from lost production caused by power outages is used in
determination of the feasibility of mitigating measures.
Based on the findings all the variables studied like frequency of outage, duration of
outage and type of outage are found to have significant impact on the companies
productivity and profitability and they are willing to pay extra to minimize the power
interruption and duration.
The result of the study shows that the five companies lost 5,547 hrs of operation due to
power loss and it is estimated to be a total of 90 million birr due to idle manpower over
the course of four years and also their labor productivity only by power interruption went
down on average by 3.5% and a total of 1 million ton of cement is not supplied to the
market. When it comes to willingness to pay the companies are willing to pay 1.07%
additional cost for a reduction of frequency of outage by 1 and willing to pay 13.3% more
for a reduction of the duration by 1hr. and 0.5% more payment for a prior notification
before the outages.
Keywords: Choice experiment, Power outage, Willingness to pay, Conditional Logit,
Loss