Structural Vulnerability of Power Grids to Disasters: Bounds and Reinforcement Measures

Failures of power grid components during natural disasters like hurricanes can fragment the network and lead to creation of islands and blackouts. The propagation of failures in actual power grids following a catastrophic event differs significantly and thus is harder to analyze than on random networks. This paper studies the structural vulnerability of real power grids to natural disasters and presents improved bounds to quantify the size of the expected damage induced. The performance of the derived bounds are demonstrated through simulations on an IEEE test case and a real grid network. Further a framework based on the eigen-decomposition of the power grid network is used to study adversarial attacks aimed to minimize network resilience. The insights gained are used to design reinforcement measures to improve network resilience against such adversaries.