Effects of demand control on the complex dynamics of electric power system blackouts

The propagation of failures and blackouts in electric networks is a complex problem. Typical models, such as the ORNL-PSerc-Alaska (OPA), are based on a combination of fast and a slow dynamics. The first describes the cascading failures while the second the grid evolution though line and generation upgrades as well as demand growth, all taking place in time scales from days to years. The growing integration of renewable energy sources, whose power fluctuates in time scales from seconds to hours, together with the increase in demand, which also present fast fluctuations, require the incorporation of distributed methods of control in the demand side to avoid the high cost of ordinary control in conventional power plants. In this work, we extend the OPA model to include fluctuations in the demand at time scales of the order of minutes, intraday demand variations and the effect of demand control. We find that demand control effectively reduces the number of blackouts without increasing the probability of large-scale events.
The authors E.B.T.T., D.G. and P.C. acknowledge fund-ing from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (Spain), theAgencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI, Spain), and the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER, EU) under grant PACSS (RTI2018-093732-B-C22) and the Maria de Maeztu program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711).E.B.T.T. also acknowledges the fellowship FIS2015-63628-CZ-Z-R under the FPI program of AEI and MINEICO, Spain.B.A.C. and J.M.R.-B. acknowledge access to Uranus, a super-computer cluster located at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid(Spain).