Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS Mayfair London W1K 2NY, UK.
1] ISC-CNR Physics Dept., Univ. "La Sapienza" Piazzale Moro 5, 00185 Roma, Italy [2] IMT Alti Studi Lucca, piazza S. Ponziano 6, 55100 Lucca, Italy [3] LIMS the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences, 22 South Audley St.
Sci Rep. 2014 Jan 15;4:3694. doi: 10.1038/srep03694.
Electric power-systems are one of the most important critical infrastructures. In recent years, they have been exposed to extreme stress due to the increasing demand, the introduction of distributed renewable energy sources, and the development of extensive interconnections. We investigate the phenomenon of abrupt breakdown of an electric power-system under two scenarios: load growth (mimicking the ever-increasing customer demand) and power fluctuations (mimicking the effects of renewable sources). Our results on real, realistic and synthetic networks indicate that increasing the system size causes breakdowns to become more abrupt; in fact, mapping the system to a solvable statistical-physics model indicates the occurrence of a first order transition in the large size limit. Such an enhancement for the systemic risk failures (black-outs) with increasing network size is an effect that should be considered in the current projects aiming to integrate national power-grids into "super-grids".
电力系统是最重要的关键基础设施之一。近年来，由于需求不断增加、分布式可再生能源的引入以及广泛互联的发展，电力系统面临着巨大的压力。我们研究了电力系统在两种情况下的突然崩溃现象：负载增长（模拟不断增加的客户需求）和功率波动（模拟可再生能源的影响）。我们在真实、现实和合成网络上的结果表明，增加系统规模会导致崩溃变得更加突然；事实上，将系统映射到一个可解的统计物理模型表明，在大尺寸极限下会发生一级相变。随着网络规模的增加，系统风险故障（停电）的这种增强效应应该在当前旨在将国家电网整合到“超级电网”中的项目中加以考虑。
