Analysis of chain of events in major historic power outages

Contemporary power systems are facing increasing intricate conditions that have never been considered when initially designing the infrastructure, such as malicious threats, accommodating smart grids, etc. As a consequence, blackouts albeit seldom but stubbornly keep appearing from time to time the world around, and demonstrate their devastating capability to create vast damage on both power systems and the society at large. Patterns of the blackout starting from the first triggering events to the system final status have emerged. A framework of a coding system was proposed in this paper in order to capture the common feature in the system evolution during the development of cascades. Cascades in a blackout can be tracked by a chain of events with the help of the codes. It is facile to adopt the framework to build up a knowledge base of blackouts. By applying the proposed framework to 31 selected historic blackouts, most frequent events, effects and origins are identified; the findings can provide useful information for grid designers and security experts for ranking the most imminent issues in their study. © 2014 AECE.