Summary
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.
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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Tokyo
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Weron, R., Simonsen, I. (2006). Blackouts, risk, and fat-tailed distributions. In: Takayasu, H. (eds) Practical Fruits of Econophysics. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/4-431-28915-1_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/4-431-28915-1_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo
Print ISBN: 978-4-431-28914-2
Online ISBN: 978-4-431-28915-9
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