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.

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

References in corpus (4)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Cascade control and defense in complex networks
• PyPSA: Python for Power System Analysis
• Cascading Failures as Continuous Phase-Space Transitions

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• Predicting the cascading dynamics in complex networks via the bimodal failure size distribution
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