TITLE: Extreme events causing outages of power grids: from utility data to risk
ABSTRACT: Extreme weather events such as the 2020 derecho are gradually increasing in frequency and size, and this continues to pose a risk of damage to the electric transmission and distribution grids that power our society.
But what is the nature of the impacts on the grid of extreme events? By looking at recorded outage data for power grids, it turns out that extreme events are not outliers, and also they do not follow the most familiar statistics. However, they do follow the patterns of heavy tail statistics, in which extreme events are rarer than moderate events, but still frequent enough to pose a high risk.
I will show some heavy tailed distributions observed in utility data, explain the heavy tail statistics and how they differ from normal statistics, and discuss how we are starting to understand and quantify the extreme event risk for power grids.
BIO: Ian Dobson was educated at Cambridge University (BA Math) and Cornell University (PhD Electrical Engineering). He previously worked as a systems analyst in British industry and as faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently Sandbulte professor in electrical engineering at Iowa State University. Ian is a Life Fellow of the IEEE. Ian has worked on voltage collapse blackouts, power system stability, power electronics, and applications of bifurcations and nonlinear dynamics. He is currently interested in data analytics, complex systems, power system blackouts and resilience, and is developing a probabilistic risk analysis for power systems subject to extreme weather and cascading failure. Details and publications are available at http://iandobson.ece.iastate.edu
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