IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/natcom/v7y2016i1d10.1038_ncomms10790.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Voltage collapse in complex power grids

Author

Listed:
  • John W. Simpson-Porco

    (Engineering Building 5, University of Waterloo)

  • Florian Dörfler

    (Automatic Control Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH))

  • Francesco Bullo

    (Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation, Engineering Building II, University of California at Santa Barbara)

Abstract

A large-scale power grid’s ability to transfer energy from producers to consumers is constrained by both the network structure and the nonlinear physics of power flow. Violations of these constraints have been observed to result in voltage collapse blackouts, where nodal voltages slowly decline before precipitously falling. However, methods to test for voltage collapse are dominantly simulation-based, offering little theoretical insight into how grid structure influences stability margins. For a simplified power flow model, here we derive a closed-form condition under which a power network is safe from voltage collapse. The condition combines the complex structure of the network with the reactive power demands of loads to produce a node-by-node measure of grid stress, a prediction of the largest nodal voltage deviation, and an estimate of the distance to collapse. We extensively test our predictions on large-scale systems, highlighting how our condition can be leveraged to increase grid stability margins.

Suggested Citation

  • John W. Simpson-Porco & Florian Dörfler & Francesco Bullo, 2016. "Voltage collapse in complex power grids," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 7(1), pages 1-8, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms10790
    DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10790
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10790
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/ncomms10790?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ricciardi, Gianmarco & Montagna, Guido & Caldarelli, Guido & Cimini, Giulio, 2023. "Dimensional reduction of solvency contagion dynamics on financial networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 630(C).
    2. Robin Delabays & Saber Jafarpour & Francesco Bullo, 2022. "Multistability and anomalies in oscillator models of lossy power grids," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-12, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms10790. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.