Our electrical grid—already under stress from climate‐amplified storms and the push to renewables—is a critical lifeline. Yet outages are costly, and until now, our best measures of how much U.S. households are truly willing to pay to avoid losing power (their “value of lost load,” or VoLL) came from surveys and macroeconomic models, offering wildly different estimates. In this study, EPIcenter affiliate Bobby Harris uses data for over two million portable generator purchases (2012–2020) at a major retail chain to reveal real‐world spending when outages loom. By linking each generator’s wattage to county‐month hurricane‐based outage expectations, he estimates a residential marginal Willingness-to-Pay of $1.57 per kWh . This implies U.S. households collectively are willing to spend $1.2 billion annually to prevent interruptions. Event‐study results show generator sales jump 40–50 percent in the week before major storms, confirming that forecasts drive defensive purchases. With this revealed‐preference lens, policymakers and utilities can more accurately compare the real benefits of reliability upgrades to their costs, ensuring we invest in resilience where it matters most.
This summary was written with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot on July 8th, 2025. Its content was edited and verified by EPIcenter staff and affiliates.
Read the full paper here.