Evolving Powergrids in Self-Organized Criticality: An analogy with Sandpile and Earthquakes

The stability of powergrid is crucial since its disruption affects systems ranging from street lightings to hospital life-support systems. Nevertheless, large blackouts are inevitable if powergrids are in the state of self-organized criticality (SOC). In this paper, we introduce a simple model of evolving powergrid and establish its connection with the sandpile model, i.e. a prototype of SOC, and earthquakes, i.e. a system considered to be in SOC. Various aspects are examined, including the power-law distribution of blackout magnitudes, their inter-event waiting time, the predictability of large blackouts, as well as the spatial-temporal rescaling of blackout data. We verified our observations on simulated networks as well as the IEEE 118-bus system, and show that both simulated and empirical blackout waiting times can be rescaled in space and time similarly to those observed between earthquakes. Finally, we suggested proactive maintenance strategies to drive the powergrids away from SOC to suppress large blackouts.