US Power Outages

[Lucky Green]

At 18:15 8/11/96, Dave Farber wrote:
>The avalanche behavior of power systems is still not
>well understood and techniques to prevent such failures are not obvious.
>Same can be said of telephone and computer networks at different levels.

Does somebody here have a pointer to literature on this topic? A system in
which small localized disturbances can amplify, propagate through the
system, leading to catastrophic failure is the worst of all possible
designs. I fail to understand why a system as important as the power grid
would display this type of behavior. Why is the grid negatively dampened?

TIA,


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