Lecturer: Prof. Marc Timme
Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and
Self-Organization
& Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics
Faculty of Physics, University of Goettingen
Abstract:
Our society depends on reliable supply with
electricity every minute. To plan, build and
operate future-compliant power grids, we first
need to understand their collective nonlinear
network dynamics. Here I highlight two recent
network phenomena revealed recently by
theoretical physics methods:
First, adding new links to power grids is
generally thought to stabilize operation yet
adding the "wrong" links may cause failure.
This phenomenon -- Braess' Paradox -- persists
in oscillatory (AC) power grids, where it stems
from geometric frustration, a purely
topological property. Second, we derive a
renormalized linear response theory to predict
which links are most needed in the sense that
their failure is likely to induce a larger-scale
outage. The network-based measures we
derive drastically outperform local measures
such as individual links' loads in prediction
success.
[This is work with several colleagues and
students, including Dirk Witthaut, Martin
Rohden, Sarah Hallerberg, Xiaozhu Zhang,
Debsankha Manik and Andreas Sorge.]
References:
Braess' Paradox: (New J. Phys 2012).
Decentralization: (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2012).
Critical Links: Witthaut et al., in preparation (2015).