arXiv:cond-mat/0401084cond-mat.dis-nn
Structural Vulnerability of the North American Power Grid
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Abstract
The magnitude of the August 2003 blackout affecting the United States has put the challenges of energy transmission and distribution into limelight. Despite all the interest and concerted effort, the complexity and interconnectivity of the electric infrastructure have so far precluded us from understanding why certain events happened. In this paper we study the power grid from a network perspective and determine its ability to transfer power between generators and consumers when certain nodes are disrupted. We find that the power grid is robust to most perturbations, yet disturbances affecting key transmision substations greatly reduce its ability to function. We emphasize that the global properties of the underlying network must be understood as they greatly affect local behavior.
You don't need to take out hundreds of plants. Typically you might only need to cause a few targeted failures at the right time, and if you do this in a nasty way you can cause a cascading failure, taking out key transmission lines or other nodes in the network. *…
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