Electric power systems, around the world, are changing in terms of structure, operation, management and ownership due to technical, financial and ideological reasons. Power system keeps on expanding in terms of geographical areas, assets additions, and penetration of new technologies in generation, transmission and distribution. This makes the electric power system complex, heavily stressed and...

Electric power systems, around the world, are changing in terms of structure, operation, management and ownership due to technical, financial and ideological reasons. Power system keeps on expanding in terms of geographical areas, assets additions, and penetration of new technologies in generation, transmission and distribution. This makes the electric power system complex, heavily stressed and...

Tandem computer systems are designed to be single-fault tolerant. This paper takes a census of customer system outages reported to Tandem. The census shows a clear improvement in the reliability of hardware and maintenance. It indicates that now (1989) software is the majority source of reported system outages (62%), followed by system operations (15%). This is a dramatic shift from the statist...

The planning and scheduling of the operations involved in the outages of nuclear power plants has a great impact in terms of the outage costs (replacement power, labor cost, etc.), use of scarce resources and implementation of safety procedures. Prior to 1979, before the accident at Three Mile Island (TMI), refueling was the driving factor of outages of nuclear power plants: maintenance plans w...

Tandem computer systems are designed to be single-fault tolerant. This paper takes a census of customer system outages reported to Tandem. The census shows a clear improvement in the reliability of hardware and maintenance. It indicates that now (1989) software is the majority source of reported system outages (62%), followed by system operations (15%). This is a dramatic shift from the statist...

This paper describes two new approaches to cascading failure analysis in power systems that can combine large amounts of data about cascading blackouts to produce information about the ways that cascades may propagate. In the first, we evaluate methods for representing cascading failure information in the form of a graph. We refer to these graphs as “dual graphs” because the vertices are the tr...

The Electric Power grid makes an attractive target because it is the foundational critical infrastructure that underlies all others. A successful attack on the power grid causing a wide-area long-term outage would have significant national security, economic, and public health and safety consequences. Power grid outages could even cause additional cascading failures in other critical infrastruc...

Incident data about disruptions to the electric power grid provide useful information that can be used as inputs into risk management policies in the energy sector for disruptions from a variety of origins, including terrorist attacks. This article uses data from the Disturbance Analysis Working Group (DAWG) database, which is maintained by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC)...

Utilities face the challenge of responding to power outages due to storms and ice damage, but most power grids are not equipped with sensors to pinpoint the precise location of the faults causing the outage. Instead, utilities have to depend primarily on phone calls (trouble calls) from customers who have lost power to guide the dispatching of utility trucks. In this paper, we develop a policy ...