Blackout prevention: Managing complexity with technology

With the development of electric power grid in China, some experiences in blackout analysis and prevention have been obtained. The experiences show that the security operations of bulk electric power systems depend not only on the technologies of system operation, analysis and control, but also on the management of power systems. This paper reviews the strategies of prevention cascading failures in China, and then discusses an emerging technology based on self-organized criticality theory for analyzing the cascading failures in the viewpoint of macro-scale. A framework of the future power system control centers to avoid blackouts is also described.