“The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates.”The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. “I suppose I should be open-minded to new research, but I'm not convinced,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage. “Whenever you have such dependencies in the system, failure in one place leads to failure in another place, which cascades into collapse.” The electric grid, which operates as a series of networks that are defined by geography, is a prime example, says Havlin. The upshot, published August 25 in Nature Physics, is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt-and unpredictable-collapse. ![]() ![]() Study co-author Shlomo Havlin of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, says that the research builds on earlier work by incorporating a more explicit analysis of how the spatial nature of physical networks affects their fundamental stability. That is according to a mathematical study of spatial networks by physicists in Israel and the U.S. Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse.
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