TITLE:
Branching Process based Cascading Failure Probability Analysis for a Regional Power Grid in China with Utility Outage Data
AUTHORS:
Hui Ren, Ji Xiong, David Watts, Yibo Zhao
KEYWORDS:
Cascading Failure; Poisson; Power Law; Branching Process; Generalized Poisson; Borel-Tanner
JOURNAL NAME:
Energy and Power Engineering,
Vol.5 No.4B,
November
12,
2013
ABSTRACT: Studying the propagation of cascading failures through
the transmission network is key to asses and mitigate the risk faced the energy
system. As complex systems the power grid failure is often studied using some
probability distributions. We apply 4 well-known probabilistic models, Poisson
model, Power Law model, Generalized Poisson Branching process model and
Borel-Tanner Branching process model, to a 14-year utility historical outage
data from a regional power grid in China, computing probabilities of
cascading line outages. For this data, the empirical distribution of the total
number of line outages is well approximated by the initial line outages
propagating according to a Borel-Tanner branching process. Also for this data,
Power law model overestimates, while Generalized Possion branching process and
Possion model underestimate, the probability of larger outages. Especially, the
probability distribution generated by the Poisson model deviates heavily from
the observed data, underestimating the probability of large events (total no.
of outages over 5) by roughly a factor of 10-2 to 10-5. The observation is
confirmed by a statistical test of model fitness. The results of this work
indicate that further testing of Borel-Tanner branching process models of
cascading failure is appropriate, and should be further discussed as it
outperforms other more traditional models.