Emergence of scale-free blackout sizes in power grids
Physics and Society
2020-08-05 v1 Systems and Control
Systems and Control
Probability
Abstract
We model power grids as graphs with heavy-tailed sinks, which represent demand from cities, and study cascading failures on such graphs. Our analysis links the scale-free nature of blackout sizes to the scale-free nature of city sizes, contrasting previous studies suggesting that this nature is governed by self-organized criticality. Our results are based on a new mathematical framework combining the physics of power flow with rare event analysis for heavy-tailed distributions, and are validated using various synthetic networks and the German transmission grid.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2007.06967,
title = {Emergence of scale-free blackout sizes in power grids},
author = {Tommaso Nesti and Fiona Sloothaak and Bert Zwart},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.06967},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
27 pages (6 pages + 21 pages with supplemental material). Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters