Emergent Failures and Cascades in Power Grids: A Statistical Physics Perspective

Tommaso Nesti; Alessandro Zocca; Bert Zwart

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.258301

Emergent Failures and Cascades in Power Grids: A Statistical Physics Perspective

Tommaso Nesti, Alessandro Zocca, Bert Zwart

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

We model power grids transporting electricity generated by intermittent renewable sources as complex networks, where line failures can emerge indirectly by noisy power input at the nodes. By combining concepts from statistical physics and the physics of power flows and taking weather correlations into account, we rank line failures according to their likelihood and establish the most likely way such failures occur and propagate. Our insights are mathematically rigorous in a small-noise limit and are validated with data from the German transmission grid.

Original language	English
Article number	258301
Journal	Physical Review Letters
Volume	120
Issue number	25
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.258301
Publication status	Published - 21 Jun 2018
Externally published	Yes

Funding

We thank the referees for many useful comments, in particular, for suggesting SciGRID. NWO Vici 639.033.413 and NWO Rubicon 680.50.1529 grants provided financial support. A. Z. acknowledges the support of Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech.

Funders	Funder number
Resnick Sustainability Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability, California Institute of Technology
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

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Emergent Failures and Cascades in Power Grids: A Statistical Physics Perspective

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