Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, March 8, 2010 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Paul Hines
"Cascading Failures in Power Grids"
ABSTRACT -- While electric power grids are generally robust to small failures and thus provide a fairly high level of reliability, they are notably vulnerable to large, spectacular cascading failures. Single component failures rarely impede the ability of a power grid to serve its customers. But larger sets of concurrent outages can produce blackouts with sizes that are highly improbable from the perspective of Gaussian statistics. Because of the number of components in a power grid it is impossible to plan for and mitigate all sets of failures. Maintaining a high level of reliability in the midst of this risk is challenging. As market forces, variable sources (e.g., wind and solar power) and new loads (e.g., electric cars) increase stress on electricity infrastructure, the challenge of managing grid reliability and costs will certainly increase. Therefore we need strategies that enable the most important services that depend on electricity to continue in the midst of this risk. This talk will discuss two strategies for enabling services that depend on electricity to continue in the midst of significant systemic vulnerability. The first is survivability, in which backup electricity sources provide a very high level of reliability for services that are economically and socially vital. The second is Artificial Reciprocal Altruism, in which control agents that manage the infrastructure are encouraged to align personal goals with those of the system as a whole.
SPEAKER -- Paul Hines is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Vermont. He is also a member of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center Adjunct Research Faculty and a commissioner for the Burlington Electric Department. He received the Ph.D. degree in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon U. in 2007 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the U. of Washington in 2001. Formerly he worked at the US National Energy Technology Laboratory, where he participated in Smart Grid research, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where he studied interactions between nuclear power plants and power grids, Alstom ESCA, where he developed load forecasting software, and for Black and Veatch, where he worked on substation design projects. His main research interests are in the areas of complex systems and networks, the control of cascading failures in power systems and energy system reliability.