Complex systems analysis of series of blackouts: cascading failure, critical points, and self-organization.

By Ian Dobson, Benjamin A. Carreras, Vickie E. Lynch, David E. Newman. Chaos, 2007

964 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We give an overview of a complex systems approach to large blackouts of electric power transmission systems caused by cascading failure. Instead of looking at the details of particular blackouts, we study the statistics and dynamics of series of blackouts with approximate global models. Blackout data from several countries suggest that the frequency of large blackouts is governed by a power law. The power law makes the risk of large blackouts consequential and is consistent with the power system being a complex system designed and operated near a critical point. Power system overall loading or stress relative to operating limits is a key factor affecting the risk of cascading failure. Power system blackout models and abstract models of cascading failure show critical points with power law behavior as load is increased. To explain why the power system is operated near these critical points and inspired by concepts from self-organized criticality, we suggest that power system operating margins evolve slowly to near a critical point and confirm this idea using a power system model. The slow evolution of the power system is driven by a steady increase in electric loading, economic pressures to maximize the use of the grid, and the engineering responses to blackouts that upgrade the system. Mitigation of blackout risk should account for dynamical effects in complex self-organized critical systems. For example, some methods of suppressing small blackouts could ultimately increase the risk of large blackouts.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4f7e6b0180dbfb7ec7703a0511ee19f7a56e5a1

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Citations in the corpus

Trends in the history of large blackouts in the United States (2008, background): “Alternatively (or perhaps additionally), this may be the result of power networks being more stressed during mid-afternoon hours, indicating proximity to critical points at which blackout probability increases sharply [2, 12, 24 ].”
The three perspectives on energy security: intellectual history, disciplinary roots and the potential for integration (2011, background): “Likewise there are interesting attempts to link economic and technical analysis as well complexity theories in explaining the connection between liberalization, investment and reliability of electricity networks [34,60].”
For the Grid and Through the Grid: The Role of Power Line Communications in the Smart Grid (2010, background): “, percolation theory in random geometric graphs [127]) to analyze “phase transitions” with application to blackout analysis [128].”
Universality in network dynamics (2013, positive): “The distribution of cascade sizes induced by perturbations, P ( C ), is frequently measured in social [42–44] technological [45, 46] and biological [41, 47] systems, finding that P ( C ) is often fat-tailed, an observation whose origins remain unclear.”
Resilience assessment of interdependent infrastructure systems: With a focus on joint restoration modeling and analysis (2015, background): “The DC power flow equation F = AP provides a relationship between power flow vector F consisting of the flow through each line and the power injection vector P at the nodes, with A as a constant matrix [40].”
North American Blackout Time Series Statistics and Implications for Blackout Risk (2016, background): “Theory models for cascading with subcritical propagation show a power law region for intermediate blackouts and an exponentially decaying region for the largest blackouts [16].”
Large blackouts in North America: Historical trends and policy implications (2009, background): “International blackout data also show a power-law size-frequency relationship (Holmgren and Molin, 2006; Dobson et al., 2007), indicating that this relationship is fundamental to the structure of power grids in developed countries.”
Risk Assessment of Cascading Outages: Methodologies and Challenges (2012, background): “in both theoretical models and empirical blackout data [10], [11].”
Suppressing cascades of load in interdependent networks (2011, background): “[15] Dobson I, Carreras BA, Lynch VE, Newman DE (2007) Complex systems analysis of series of blackouts: Cascading failure, critical points, and self-organization.”