The Impact of the Topology on Cascading Failures in Electric Power Grids

Cascading failures are one of the main reasons for blackouts in power transmission grids. The topology of a power grid, together with its operative state determine, for the most part, the robustness of the power grid against cascading failures. Secure electrical power supply requires, together with careful operation, a robust design of the electrical power grid topology. This paper investigates the impact of a power grid topology on its robustness against cascading failures. Currently, the impact of the topology on a grid robustness is mainly assessed by using purely topological approaches that fail to capture the essence of electric power flow. This paper proposes a metric, the effective graph resistance, that relates the topology of a power grid to its robustness against cascading failures by deliberate attacks, while also taking the fundamental characteristics of the electric power grid into account such as power flow allocation according to Kirchoff Laws. Experimental verification shows that the proposed metric anticipates the grid robustness accurately. The proposed metric is used to optimize a grid topology for a higher level of robustness. To demonstrate its applicability, the metric is applied on the IEEE 118 bus power system to improve its robustness against cascading failures.