US consumers becoming more concerned about outages finds survey

Despite significant investments in modernising the electric grid, 41% of consumers in the US are more concerned with power outages today compared to 10 years ago, finds the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.

According to the US non-profit, which aims to help educate the public and engage consumers on the benefits of the smart grid, only 10% of consumers in the United States are less concerned with outages.

This is according to the organisation’s Extreme Weather and Power Outages: Communicating with Customers survey, which explores how electricity providers can help residential customers better prepare for extreme weather and how they can better communicate with them when power outages do occur.

Jordan Folks, associate director of Opinion Dynamics, commented on rising consumer concern during a webinar announcement: “When we saw this data, it was a little bit disappointing with all the grid hardening investments that have been made over the last 10 years, but if you look into it (…) one explanation could be that consumers have more devices connected to power than they had, possible, 10 years ago.

“So when the power is out, they’re more inconvenienced. That could be one reason why customers have that raised concern.”

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Survey findings

According to the survey, when it comes to preparing for potential outages, 42% of consumers stated they would be open to sharing control of their electricity usage to help their utilities better prepare for and manage outages. The 58% majority, however, said they would not.

According to Folks, these numbers aligned with, and in some cases were higher than, prior Collaborative surveys on demand response.

Additionally, while less than half of today’s consumers say that they are more concerned with outages, nearly all (91%) would like their electricity providers to provide tips and suggestions to help them prepare for extreme weather events and power outages.

Survey respondents stated that email (51%), website (39%), text message (38%) and on-bill information (34%) were the top channels where they would like to see these tips.

When it comes to communicating with customers about outages in their area, text messaging has become the preferred channel for most consumers (55%).

However, there are still sizable numbers of customers that prefer other channels, including 16% for email, 15% for a phone call and 11% for an emergency alert push notification. Only two percent of respondents preferred some other means of communication.

Commented Tami Zaun, energy cooperative Lake Country Power’s public relations coordinator: “Keeping members informed on the status of outages and being easy to reach to report that power outage is a key driver of overall satisfaction.”