Asymmetry underlies stability in power grids

Abstract

Behavioral homogeneity is often critical for the functioning of network systems of interacting entities. In power grids, whose stable operation requires generator frequencies to be synchronized--and thus homogeneous--across the network, previous work suggests that the stability of synchronous states can be improved by making the generators homogeneous. Here, we show that a substantial additional improvement is possible by instead making the generators suitably heterogeneous. We develop a general method for attributing this counterintuitive effect to converse symmetry breaking, a recently established phenomenon in which the system must be asymmetric to maintain a stable symmetric state. These findings constitute the first demonstration of converse symmetry breaking in real-world systems, and our method promises to enable identification of this phenomenon in other networks whose functions rely on behavioral homogeneity.

Updated to correct the damping parameters in Fig. 1 and its caption, which were inadvertently over-rounded in the original version. The published version of the Article has also been updated with this correction

References in corpus (5)

• Synchronization in complex networks
• Optimal PMU Placement for Power System Dynamic State Estimation by Using Empirical Observability Gramian
• Symmetric States Requiring System Asymmetry
• Cascading Failures as Continuous Phase-Space Transitions
• Network experiment demonstrates converse symmetry breaking

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Interpretable disorder-promoted synchronization and coherence in coupled laser networks
• Optimal flock formation induced by agent heterogeneity
• Disorder-promoted stability
• Modelling power grids as pseudo adaptive networks