This paper uses an unusual month-long blackout in Zanzibar, Tanzania, to measure the effect of electricity on labor and health. Relying on special purpose household surveys I find that the power cut caused a large decline in household income among those employed in occupations that require the use of electricity. Workers relying on artificial lighting reduced work hours by an average of 8%, or ...

The dynamics of power system blackouts and the associated Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) behavior is a subject that receives continuous attention in view of its inherent complexity and relevant consequences. Within this context, the paper focuses on the short-term dynamic and, more specifically, aims at studying the role of the spinning reserve and frequency control on the blackout mechanism....

We consider the risk of cascading failure of electric power transmission systems as overall loading is increased. There is evidence from both abstract and power systems models of cascading failure that there is a critical loading at which the risk of cascading failure sharply increases. Moreover, as expected in a phase transition, at the critical loading there is a power tail in the probability...

The study of the dynamics taking place during power system blackouts is a subject that receives continuous attention in view of its inherent complexity and relevant consequences. Within this context, the paper aims at studying the role of the frequency control reserves (FCRs) on the cascading outages and the relevant short-term dynamics associated with the blackout mechanisms. The relationship ...

We verify and examine criticality in a 1000 bus network with an AC blackout model that represents many of the interactions that occur in cascading failure. At the critical loading there is a sharp rise in the mean b l a c k out size and a power law probability distr ibution of blackout size that indicates a s i g n i f i cant risk of large blackouts.

This paper presents an assessment of the vulnerability of the power grid to blackout using graph topological indexes. Based on a FERC 715 report and the outage reports, the cascading faults of summer WSCC 1996 are reconstructed, and the graphical property of the grid is compared between two cases: when the blackout triggering lines are removed simulating the actual sequence of cascading outages...

A model has been developed to study the global complex dynamics of a series of blackouts in power transmission systems [1, 2]. This model has included a simple level of self-organization by incorporating the growth of power demand and the engineering response to system failures. Two types of blackouts have been identified with different dynamical properties. One type of blackout involves loss o...

Cascading failures in large-scale electric power transmission systems are an important cause of blackouts. Analysis of North American blackout data has revealed power law (algebraic) tails in the blackout size probability distribution which suggests a dynamical origin. With this observation as motivation, we examine cascading failure in a simplified transmission system model as load power deman...