Self-organized Criticality and Its Application in Power System Collapse Prevention

The state electric power transmission networks of china is experiencing rapid changes and will continue to be operated closer to a stressed condition in which there is substantial risk of cascading outages and blackouts. Major cascading disturbances, or blackouts of these transmission systems can obviously cause severe damage to our society. Based on the concept of self-organized criticality (SOC) and fractal and by analyzing power system blackouts in China from 1981 to 2002, the characters of SOC of domestic power system blackouts are revealed, and the scale-frequency models for blackouts occurred in nationwide power grid are constructed. For these statistics, it strongly suggests that SOC dynamics may play an important role in the global complex dynamics of power systems.