The traditional Power Grid has been designed in a hierarchical fashion, with Energy pushed from the large scale production facilities towards the end users. But with the increasing availability of micro and medium scale generating facilities, the situation is changing. Many end users can now produce energy and share it over the Power Grid. Naturally, end users need to have incentives to do so and might want to be able to act in an open decentralized energy market. In the present work, we offer a novel analysis of the Medium and Low Voltage Power Grids of the North Netherlands using statistical tools from the Complex Network Analysis field. We use a weighted model based on actual Grid data and propose a set of statistical measures to evaluate the adequacy of the current infrastructure for a decentralized energy market. Further, we use the insight gained by the analysis to propose parameters that tie the statistical topological measures to economic factors that might influence the attractiveness to the end users in participating in such a decentralized energy market, thus identifying what are the important topological parameters to work on to facilitate such open decentralized markets.
A different model is presented by Chassin @cite_37 where the analysis focuses on the North American Power Grid. The authors start with the hypothesis that the Grid can be modelled as a Scale-free network. This work is extremely relevant for the large size of the sample analysed (more than 300000 nodes) and the use of reliability measures that are typical of power engineering (e.g., loss of load probability) to quantify the failure characteristics of the network from a topological point of view. The similarity of the results obtained by considering reliability with authors' topological measures and other non topological studies for electrical Grids is interesting. However, a study of betweenness is unfortunately missing. Given the size of the sample (although it is not explicitly stated if components are considered or not) it would have useful to compute the betweenness of the nodes in order to understand if and how the betweenness behaves in this sort of big sample.
@cite_37
1999647190
The reliability of electric transmission systems is examined using a scale-free model of network topology and failure propagation. The topologies of the North American eastern and western electric grids are analyzed to estimate their reliability based on the Barabasi–Albert network model. A commonly used power system reliability index is computed using a simple failure propagation model. The results are compared to the values of power system reliability indices previously obtained using standard power engineering methods, and they suggest that scale-free network models are usable to estimate aggregate electric grid reliability.