Emergence of scale-free blackout sizes in power grids

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.

arXiv comment27 pages (6 pages + 21 pages with supplemental material). Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

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• Scale-Free Networks beyond Power-Law Degree Distribution
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• Improving power-grid systems via topological changes, or how self-organized criticality can help stability
• Dynamical heterogeneity and universality of power-grids
• How modular structure determines operational resilience of power grids
• Revisiting and modeling power-law distributions in empirical outage data of power systems
• The Waiting-Time Distribution for Network Partitions in Cascading Failures in Power Networks
• Predicting the cascading dynamics in complex networks via the bimodal failure size distribution
• Modeling Multistability and Hysteresis in Urban Congestion Spreading
• Starvation suppression in dense scale-free metabolic networks: Dynamical mean-field analysis of catalytic reaction networks