School wins share of £1.1M grant to study blackouts in energy grids
The School of Mathematics is part of a £1.1M consortium set up in collaboration with scientists from Edinburgh University. The consortium is supported by the EPSRC through the initiative "Energy challenges for complexity science".
National energy grids suffer occasionally from catastrophic events that lead to large scale blackouts, which have enormous economic, political and psychological costs. Over the last decade or so, the frequency of such events has been increasing dramatically; for example, in 2003 there was a series of wide-area blackouts in the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, and in 2006 a wide-area disturbance in Europe fractured the European grid into three parts. The consortium has been set up to develop tools to provide real-time procedures for preventing and managing catastrophic events of this type.
The project is lead by Professor Janusz Bialek who holds the Bert Whittington Chair of Electrical Engineering at the Institute for Energy Systems, at the University of Edinburgh. This multidisciplinary research will involve power engineering, operational research, modeling and pure mathematics, and the team of investigators includes Professor Jacek Brodzki, Professor Graham A Niblo and Dr Nicholas Wright from the Pure Mathematics group in the School of Mathematics. The Southampton team will lead the development of rigorous mathematical understanding of such events, which will provide a basis for developing procedures that will be tested and implemented in collaboration with other members of the team.
This project is already attracting interest from industry, with strong support provided by the National Grid. The project's steering group will include representatives of the Electricity Supply Research Network, which has a mix of Industrial members (10 Companies) and Academic members (about 40 University Schools).