Power system blackouts - literature review

Increasing electrical energy demand, modern lifestyles and energy usage patterns have made the world fully dependant on power systems. This instigated mandatory requirements for the operators to maintain high reliability and stability of the power system grid. However, the power system is a highly nonlinear system, which changes its operations continuously. Therefore, it is very challenging and uneconomical to make the system be stable for all disturbances. The system is usually designed to handle a single outage at a time. However, during the last decade several major blackouts were reported and all of them started with single outages. Each major blackout was mandatorily and transparently reported to the public. The properly written blackout reports help to minimize the operational risk, by strengthening the system and its operations based on selected high risk contingencies. In the last decade, several major blackouts were reported separately in many research papers. This paper lists a good collection of properly reported literatures on power system stability and reliability including history of blackouts. Some critical comments on root causes, lessons learnt from the blackouts and solutions are addressed while briefly discussing the blackout events presented in published literatures.