Electric power transmission systems are a key infrastructure and blackouts of these systems have major direct and indirect consequences on the economy and national security. In particular, electric power blackouts have cascading effects on other vital infrastructures. While it is useful to analyze the detailed causes of individual blackouts, in this paper we focus on the intrinsic dynamics of s...

BACKGROUND Alcohol-related blackouts (ARBs) are reported by ~50% of drinkers. While much is known about the prevalence of ARBs in young adults and their cross-sectional correlates, there are few prospective studies regarding their trajectories over time during mid-adolescence. This paper reports latent trajectory classes of ARBs between age 15 and 19, along with predictors of those patterns. ...

The country seems to have quickly embarked on a new energy crisis. "From Manhattan to Montana, worries are mount­ ing that skyrocketing power prices and rolling blackouts will soon spread from their epicenter in California.... Concern about the power picture extends to the top levels of the Bush Administration as it attempts to hammer out a new energy policy."i As politicians search for possibl...

Original scientific paper Network skeleton reconfiguration is an important task during power system restoration after blackout. The uncertainty of the restoration time and the restoration successful rate during the network skeleton reconfiguration are considered in the paper. The restoration time of transmission lines and transformers, units’ startup time limit and the restoration successful ra...

The steady-state operation of maintaining voltage stability is done by switching various controllers scattered all over the power network. When a contingency occurs, whether forced or unforced, the dispatcher is to alleviate the problem in a minimum time, cost, and effort. Persistent problem may lead to blackout. The dispatcher is to have the appropriate switching of controllers in terms of typ...

plex networks are pervasive in social and physical sciences. Three recent global-scale contagions that have received attention in the media as well as academic circles are (1) current and past financial contagions (Desai 2003),1 (2) failure of the coupled infrastructure system caused by power-grid failure, for example, the Northeast blackout of 2003,2 and (3) potential pandemics caused by influ...

The risk of cascading blackouts greatly relies on failure probabilities of individual components in power grids. To quantify how component failure probabilities (CFP) influences blackout risk (BR), this paper proposes a sample-induced semianalytic approach to characterize the relationship between CFP and BR. To this end, we first give a generic component failure probability function (CoFPF) to ...