Blackouts, risk, and fat-tailed distributions

Abstract

We analyze a 19-year time series of North American electric power transmission system blackouts. Contrary to previously reported results we find a fatter than exponential decay in the distribution of inter-occurrence times and evidence of seasonal dependence in the number of events. Our findings question the use of self-organized criticality, and in particular the sandpile model, as a paradigm of blackout dynamics in power transmission systems. Hopefully, though, they will provide guidelines to more accurate models for evaluation of blackout risk.