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.
Sole @cite_13 go further in exploring the same data analysed in @cite_39 , in particular they focus on targeted attacks. The model is based on the assumption, also verified by empirical data, that there is no correlation between nodes having a certain degree to be connected to each other. This work has an overall relevant sample and it focuses on simulating different failure events (random or targeted), establishing an interesting correlation between topological and non-topological reliability studies. The major point of improvement is related to the small size of half of the samples used (below 100 in order) and the possibility of introducing weights for edges related to some of the physical properties. In addition, an evaluation of the betweenness is missing in order to understand if other nodes appear to be critical and so to be targeted using this different removal metric.
@cite_13 @cite_39
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The power grid defines one of the most important technological networks of our times and sustains our complex society. It has evolved for more than a century into an extremely huge and seemingly robust and well understood system. But it becomes extremely fragile as well, when unexpected, usually minimal, failures turn into unknown dynamical behaviours leading, for example, to sudden and massive blackouts. Here we explore the fragility of the European power grid under the effect of selective node removal. A mean field analysis of fragility against attacks is presented together with the observed patterns. Deviations from the theoretical conditions for network percolation (and fragmentation) under attacks are analysed and correlated with non topological reliability measures. We present an analysis of the topological structure and static tolerance to errors and attacks of the September 2003 actualization of the Union for the Coordination of Transport of Electricity (UCTE) power grid, involving thirty-three different networks. Though every power grid studied has exponential degree distribution and most of them lack typical small-world topology, they display patterns of reaction to node loss similar to those observed in scale-free networks. We have found that the node removal behavior can be logarithmically related to the power grid size. This logarithmic behavior would suggest that, though size favors fragility, growth can reduce it. We conclude that, with the ever-growing demand for power and reliability, actual planning strategies to increase transmission systems would have to take into account this relative increase in vulnerability with size, in order to facilitate and improve the power grid design and functioning.