Blackout

About: Blackout is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2088 publications have been published within this topic receiving 30433 citations.

Sociotechnical Network Analysis for Power Grid Resilience in South Korea

Abstract: International efforts to improve power grid resilience mostly focus on technological solutions to reduce the probability of losses by designing hardened, automated, redundant, and smart systems. However, how well a system recovers from failures depends on policies and protocols for human and organizational coordination that must be considered alongside technological analyses. In this work, we develop a sociotechnical network analysis that considers technological and human systems together to support improved blackout response. We construct corresponding infrastructure and social network models for the Korean power grid and analyze them with betweenness to identify critical infrastructures and emergency management organizations. Power grid network analysis reveals important power companies and emergency management headquarters for responding to infrastructure losses, where social network analysis reveals how information-sharing and decision-making authority shifts among these organizations. We find that separate analyses provide relevant yet incomplete recommendations for improving blackout management protocols. In contrast, combined results recommend explicit ways to improve response by connecting key owner, operator, and emergency management organizations with the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy. Findings demonstrate that both technological and social analyses provide important information for power grid resilience, and their combination is necessary to avoid unintended consequences for future blackout events.

Recent blackouts in US and continental Europe: is liberalisation to blame?

Abstract: The paper starts with a detailed technical overview of recent blackouts in the US, Sweden/Denmark and Italy in order to analyse common threads and lessons to be learnt. The blackouts have exposed a number of challenges facing utilities worldwide. Increased liberalisation of electricity supply industry has resulted in a significant increase in inter-area (or cross-border) trades which often are not properly accounted for when assessing system security. The traditional decentralised way of operating systems by TSOs, with each TSO looking after its own control area and little information exchange, resulted in inadequate and slow response to contingencies. A new mode of coordinated operation for real-time security assessment and control is needed in order to maintain system security. This new mode of operation requires overcoming a number of organisational, psychological, legal and technical challenges but the alternative is either to risk another blackout or run the interconnected system very conservatively, maintaining large security margin at a high cost to everyone. The paper also includes technical appendices explaining engineering power system concepts to non-engineering audience.

Attacks on smart grid: power supply interruption and malicious power generation

Abstract: Electric power supply is an essential component for several sectors including manufacturing, healthcare, building management, water distribution, and transportation systems. Hence, any interruption in electric power is likely to have an undesirable impact on the overall operation of any residential or commercial ecosystem. The serious impacts of power supply interruption attacks have been realized in the recent cyber incidents such as the Ukraine power blackout. It is also evident from recent incidents that both network and process vulnerabilities are crucial for an adversary to cause an adverse impact on the operation. This paper reports an investigation into power supply interruption and malicious power generation attacks focusing on process and network vulnerabilities. The investigation was conducted in two steps: First, a vulnerability assessment was conducted on a fully operational electric power testbed. Next, the vulnerabilities discovered were exploited to perform different types of power supply interruption attacks and malicious power generation attacks. The attacks were executed using control code modification and SMA, a PV converter manufacturer, portal manipulation. The attacks reported here are useful for researchers and smart-grid operators to design and develop effective protection, detection, and response mechanisms.

Benefits of FACTS for Power System Enhancement

Abstract: The performance of power systems decreases with the size, the loading and the complexity of the networks. This is related to problems with load flow, power oscillations and voltage quality. Such problems are even deepened by the changing situations resulting from deregulation of the electrical power markets. The power systems have not been designed for wide-area power trading with daily varying load patterns where power flows do no more follow the initial planning criteria of the existing network configuration. Large blackouts in America and Europe confirmed clearly, that the favorable close electrical coupling might also include risk of uncontrollable cascading effects in large and heavily loaded interconnected systems. FACTS (flexible AC transmission systems), however, provide the necessary features to avoid technical problems in the power systems and they increase the transmission efficiency

Dynamic real-time reconfiguration in distributed systems: timing issues and solutions

Abstract: Dynamic software reconfiguration is a useful tool to adapt and maintain software systems. In most approaches, the system has to be stopped while the reconfiguration is in progress. This is not suitable for real-time systems, even on small-embedded systems. Timing constraints must be met even while the system is reconfiguring. Our approach is based on the real-time middleware OSA+. Our main objective is to be able to reconfigure services during run-time, with a predictable and predefined blackout time (the time the systems does not react due to the reconfiguration). Three different approaches concerning the blocking or non-blocking state of a service are presented. These approaches can be used to realize a tradeoff between the reconfiguration time and the blackout time.