Criticality, Self-Organization And Cascading Failure In Blackouts Of Evolving Electric Power Networks
Ian Dobson, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The large-scale electric power transmission networks that underpin our
society occasionally fail in spectacular cascading blackouts.
The failures propagate in a rich variety of ways, including
redistributed network flows surpassing thresholds.
Simulations of the cascading failure in
blackouts suggest phase transitions
in blackout risk as power system loading is increased. Viewing the
slow upgrade of the transmission network as complex system dynamics
suggests an explanation for the observed power-law distribution of the
sizes of North American blackouts.
The network upgrade process continually improves the
components that fail in blackouts so that the
network engineering is viewed as part of the complex dynamics.
This is joint work with Benjamin
Carreras at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee and David Newman
at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
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