A New Metric to Quantify the Vulnerability of Power Grids

Major blackouts are due to cascading failures in power systems. These failures usually occur at vulnerable links of the network. To identify these, indicators have already been defined using complex network theory. However, most of these indicators only depend on the topology of the grid; they fail to detect the weak links. We introduce a new metric to identify the vulnerable lines, based on the load-flow equations and the grid geometry. Contrary to the topological indicators, ours is built from the electrical equations and considers the location and magnitude of the loads and of the power generators. We apply this new metric to the IEEE 118-bus system and compare its prediction of weak links to the ones given by an industrial software. The agreement is very well and shows that using our indicator a simple examination of the network and its generator and load distribution suffices to find the weak lines.