Cascading Blackouts Causes and Solutions

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Cascading failure is an extremely common source of blackouts wherein one component fails to some extent and, as a result, other elements are then overloaded, crashing the entire system. The effect of these crashes is significant: it can take days to restore service and as a result, societal costs have been estimated in the billions of US dollars. Their puzzling nature—occurring, as they do, in essentially undamaged systems and the triggering event is often innocuous, unremarkable, and unexpected—has led to over a half century of continuous study, since the first cascading blackout. But they keep happening.

Cascading Blackouts presents the root causes of these unfortunate incidents and establishes a powerful, practical new approach to measuring risk of cascading blackouts, based on proven, well-established principles. In their review of actions, developments, studies, and research directed at this problem, Merrill and Feltes describe both traditional models and introduce a new cascading failure network model that can be used to compute how failures propagate from branch to branch of a system. As our electrical system gets larger and more complex, these issues will continue and perhaps worsen, it is more crucial than ever to continue research on this vital area of power engineering.

Cascading Blackouts readers will also find:

• A review of fourteen historical blackouts and the systems that caused them
• Three case studies to illustrate the proposed metrics and their applications
• A practical guide to addressing key issues in complex power systems
• Written by two well-known and highly experienced consultants who have worked on large power grids all over the world

Cascading Blackouts is a useful reference for researchers and practitioners of power system development, as well as researchers of the practice.

Hyde M. Merrill, PhD, is an adjunct professor at the University of Utah and an Emeritus Principal at Merrill Energy LLC. He is an IEEE Fellow.

James W. Feltes, is a Senior Manager at Siemens PTI. He is active in several working groups of the IEEE.

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