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Related papers: Blackouts, risk, and fat-tailed distributions

200 papers

The propagation of failures and blackouts in electric networks is a complex problem. Typical models, such as the ORNL-PSerc-Alaska (OPA), are based on a combination of fast and a slow dynamics. The first describes the cascading failures…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-12-02 Benjamin A. Carreras , Eder Batista Tchawou Tchuisseu , José M. Reynolds-Barredo , Damià Gomila , Pere Colet

After decades of research, cascading blackouts remain one of the unresolved challenges in the bulk power system operations. A new perspective for measuring the susceptibility of the system to cascading failures is clearly needed. The newly…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-01-06 Sayed Abdullah Sadat , Mostafa Sahraei-Ardakani

The size distributions of power outages are shown to depend on the stress, or the proximity of the load of an electrical grid to complete breakdown. Using the data for the U.S. between 2002-2017, we show that the outage statistics are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-02-12 Soumyajyoti Biswas , Lucas Goehring

Critical transitions, ubiquitous in nature and technology, necessitate anticipation to avert adverse outcomes. While many studies focus on bifurcation-induced tipping, where a control parameter change leads to destabilization, alternative…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2026-03-03 Martin Heßler , Oliver Kamps

Weather and environmental factors are verified to have played significant roles in historical major cascading outages and blackouts. Therefore, in the simulation and risk assessment of cascading outages in power systems, it is necessary to…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2017-05-05 Rui Yao , Kai Sun

Industry reliability rules increasingly require utilities to study and mitigate cascading failure risk in their system. Motivated by this, this paper describes how cascading failure risk, in terms of expected blackout size, varies with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-11-18 Pooya Rezaei , Paul D. H. Hines

The electric power system is one of the cornerstones of modern society. One of its most serious malfunctions is the blackout, a catastrophic event that may disrupt a substantial portion of the system, playing havoc to human life and causing…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2016-03-07 Chengwei Wang , Celso Grebogi , Murilo S. Baptista

We consider power line outages in the transmission system of the power grid, and specifically those caused by a natural disaster or a large scale physical attack. In the transmission system, an outage of a line may lead to overload on other…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2012-06-07 Andrey Bernstein , Daniel Bienstock , David Hay , Meric Uzunoglu , Gil Zussman

Power grids exhibit patterns of reaction to outages similar to complex networks. Blackout sequences follow power laws, as complex systems operating near a critical point. Here, the tolerance of electric power grids to both accidental and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-03-23 S. Arianos , E. Bompard , A. Carbone , F. Xue

We consider a class of multiplicative processes which, added with stochastic reset events, give origin to stationary distributions with power-law tails -- ubiquitous in the statistics of social, economic, and ecological systems. Our main…

Statistical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2021-05-26 Damián H. Zanette , Susanna Manrubia

This is an epistemological approach to errors in both inference and risk management, leading to necessary structural properties for the probability distribution. Many mechanisms have been used to show the emergence of fat tails. Here we…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-12-16 Nassim Nicholas Taleb , Pasquale Cirillo

We introduce a model for the dynamic self-organization of the electric grid. The model is characterized by a conserved magnitude, energy, that can travel following the links of the network to satisfy nodes' load. The load fluctuates in time…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-08-16 Alessandro Scirè , Idán Tuval , Víctor M. Eguíluz

Given increasing risk from climate-induced natural hazards, there is growing interest in the development of methods that can quantitatively measure resilience in power systems. This work quantifies resilience in electric power transmission…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-06-18 Molly Rose Kelly-Gorham , Paul. D. H. Hines , Ian Dobson

Resilience risk metrics must address the customer cost of the largest blackouts of greatest impact. However, there are huge variations in blackout cost in observed distribution utility data that make it impractical to properly estimate the…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-08-14 Arslan Ahmad , Ian Dobson

Evaluating resilience in electric distribution systems under severe weather requires models that can connect network topology, hazard simulation, fragility modeling, restoration assumptions, repair strategy, and downstream consequences.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-19 Xuesong Wang , Caisheng Wang , Carol Miller , Amir Shahin Kamjou , John Norton

When there is a fault, the protection system automatically removes one or more transmission lines on a fast time scale of less than one minute. The outaged lines form a pattern in the transmission network. We extract these patterns from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-16 Ian Dobson , D. Adrian Maldonado , Mihai Anitescu

Despite significant anecdotal evidence regarding the vulnerability of the U.S. power infrastructure, there is a dearth of longitudinal and nation-level characterization of the spatial and temporal patterns in the frequency and extent of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-08-30 Bo Li , Junwei Ma , Femi Omitaomu , Ali Mostafavi

In order to identify the extent to which results from topological graph models are useful for modeling vulnerability in electricity infrastructure, we measure the susceptibility of power networks to random failures and directed attacks…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-13 Paul Hines , Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez , Seth Blumsack

We have studied the damage spreading (defined in the text) in the 'sandpile' model of self organised criticality. We have studied the variations of the critical time (defined in the text) and the total no of sites damaged at critical time…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2007-05-23 Ajanta Bhowal

The size that an epidemic can reach, measured in terms of the number of fatalities, is an extremely relevant quantity. It has been recently claimed [Cirillo & Taleb, Nature Physics 2020] that the size distribution of major epidemics in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-03-18 Alvaro Corral