Chinese Students Model How to Short-Circuit the U.S. Power Grid

[Paul Ferguson <fergdawgster () gmail com>]

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Via New Scientist.

[snip]

Predicting how rumours and epidemics percolate through populations, or how
traffic jams spread through city streets, are network analyst Jian-Wei
Wang's bread and butter. But his latest findings are likely to spark
worries in the US: he's worked out how attackers could cause a cascade of
network failures in the US's west-coast electricity grid - cutting power to
economic powerhouses Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Wang and colleagues at Dalian University of Technology in the Chinese
province of Liaoning modelled the US's west-coast grid using publicly
available data on how it, and its subnetworks, are connected.

Their aim was to examine the potential for cascade failures, where a major
power outage in a subnetwork results in power being dumped into an adjacent
subnetwork, causing a chain reaction of failures. Where, they wondered,
were the weak spots? Common sense suggests they should be the most highly
loaded networks, since pulling them offline would dump more energy into
smaller networks.

To find out if this is indeed the case, the team analysed both the power
loading and the number of connections of each grid subnetwork to establish
the order in which they would trip out in the event of a major failure. To
their surprise, under particular loading conditions, taking out a lightly
loaded subnetwork first caused more of the grid to trip out than starting
with a highly loaded one.

[snip]

More:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327255.900-how-to-shortcircuit-the-
us-power-grid.html

- - ferg

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-- 
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawgster(at)gmail.com
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
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