Motivated by developments in renewable energy and smart grids, we formulate a
stylized mathematical model of a transport network with stochastic load
fluctuations. Using an affine control rule, we explore the trade-off between
the number of controllable resources in a lossy transport network and the
performance gain they yield in terms of expected power losses. Our results are
explicit and reveal the interaction between the level of flexibility, the
intrinsic load uncertainty and the network structure.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure