Decreased resilience in power grids under dynamically induced vulnerabilities

Abstract

In this paper, a methodology inspired on bond and site percolation methods is applied to the estimation of the resilience against failures in power grids. Our approach includes vulnerability measures with both dynamical and structural foundations as an attempt to find more insights about the relationships between topology and dynamics in the second-order Kuramoto model on complex networks. As test cases for numerical simulations, we use the real-world topology of the Colombian power transmission system, as well as randomly generated networks with spatial embedding. It is observed that, by focusing the attacks on those dynamical vulnerabilities, the power grid becomes, in general, more prone to reach a state of total blackout, which in the case of node removal procedures it is conditioned by the homogeneity of power distribution in the network.