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.
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.