Power Outages and Networks

Barabasi, author of Linked, has an interesting article at the NYTimes on the recent power outages and how their severity is due mostly to our interconnectedness.

The magnitude of the blackout is rooted in an often ignored aspect of our globalized world: vulnerability due to interconnectivity…With thousands of generators and hundreds of thousands of miles of lines, the network became so interconnected that even on a normal day a single perturbance can be detected thousands of miles away…This occasionally leads to a cascading failure — a series of lines becomes overburdened and malfunctions in a short period of time…Cascading failures are common in most complex networks…Cascading failures are occasionally our ally, however…doctors and researchers hope to induce cascading failures to kill cancer cells.

The effect of power blackouts, economic crises and terrorism can easily be limited or even eliminated if we are willing to cut the links…But severing the ties would also cripple the network…While celebrating that everybody on earth is only six handshakes from us, we need to accept that so are their problems and vulnerabilities…Unless we are willing to cut the connections, the only way to change the world is to improve all nodes and links.