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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Large blackouts are usually the result of a cascade of failures of various components. A power grid being made of millions of components, occasionally a few of these components do not perform their function as desired putting additional burden on the working components, causing them to misbehave, and thus leading to a cascade of failures. The complexity of the power grid makes it difficult to model each and every individual component and study the stability of the entire system. We therefore construct an abstract model which is computationally tractable and a reasonable approximation to the power grid. We theoretically analyze this model and perform simulations which confirm the theory. (Joint work with S. Kadloor) Improvements to make the simulations much more realistic will be discussed. Reasonably good data on the transmission grid is needed to achieve further realism. I will talk about some of my recent attempts to gather openly available transmission grid data. The resulting incomplete data set is now available. Some results from analyzing the grid data (such as degree istributions/power-law) will be presented.
Host: Misha Chertkov chertkov@lanl.gov