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Reducing the Vulnerability of Electric Power Grids to Terrorist Attacks
Final Project ReportThis project (‘Reducing the Vulnerability of Electric Power Grids to Terrorist Attacks’) is collaborative research with the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy. The research at The University of Texas focuses on analyzing cascading outages in large-scale electricity grids, both as a standalone tool and also as a component to eventually be added to the Vulnerability of Electric Grids Analyzer (VEGA) [1]. We refer to the proposal (Wood, Salmeron and Baldick 2003), and references therein, for detailed background on the problem of electric power-grid vulnerability. In that document, goals were established for this research and its critical importance. One aspect of that research, conducted primarily at University of Texas at Austin (UT), is the development of a cascading analysis tool, building on the experiences of a prototype tool developed by Commonwealth Associates and described in a white paper [2]. This development is aimed at including the short-term effects of cascading outages into the analysis of network vulnerability. In addition to integrating representation of cascading outages into VEGA, informal feedback from industry suggested that it was also important that for this research to develop a standalone cascading analysis tool. Development as a standalone tool has also facilitated the division of activities between NPS and UT. This report details the development of the prototype standalone tool. Future work includes extending the types of initial disturbances that can be considered and integration of the tool with VEGA.DOE Research Project DE-FG02-05ER2567