Structural vulnerability of the North American power grid.

By Réka Albert, I. Albert, Gary Nakarado. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 2004

1,407 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The magnitude of the August 2003 blackout affecting the United States has put the challenges of energy transmission and distribution into limelight. Despite all the interest and concerted effort, the complexity and interconnectivity of the electric infrastructure precluded us for a long time from understanding why certain events happened. In this paper we study the power grid from a network perspective and determine its ability to transfer power between generators and consumers when certain nodes are disrupted. We find that the power grid is robust to most perturbations, yet disturbances affecting key transmission substations greatly reduce its ability to function. We emphasize that the global properties of the underlying network must be understood as they greatly affect local behavior.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e4077934b2ea989c74c842f0af285b6a9634f72

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In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

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