It has to be in the billions of dollars. In many cities, businesses are staying closed today due to a lack of reliable power. Untold thousands of restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses had to close last night, leading to lost business and lost wages. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of airline flights were cancelled. All sorts of impacts, while each may be fairly small, add up in a hurry when you're talking about several states and roughly 50 million people. I wonder how the cost of upgrading the power distribution grid (not cheap) would compare to the loses from a single outage like this one.