The Outage Costs in the Poultry: A Case Study for Mazandaran Province

With the passage of time and the mechanization of various agricultural sectors, the dependence of this sector on various types of energy, especially electricity, has increased and electricity has become a suitable substitute for other energy carriers in some fields. Among the agricultural sub-sectors, the poultry sub-sector has the highest consumption and dependence on electricity. Therefore, in the current research, using the survey, the willingness to pay, and the market-based methods, the costs of power outages for 42 major subscribers in Mazandaran province poultry breeding in 2020 have been investigated. The obtained results show that the willingness to pay for blackout costs per kilowatt hour of electricity for unannounced blackouts is 9,316 Rials in the lowest case and 210,623 Rials in the highest case. Moreover, due to the high sensitivity of these subscribers to power outages, 83% of producers are equipped with backup devices such as generators, which in the past year averaged 40,587 Rials for each kilowatt hour. Based on the results of this research, it is recommended to increase the reliability of electricity supply for the agricultural sector and compensate for the damages caused by power outages.