Unreliability Of U.S. Electric Grid May Offer Protection From Terrorist Attack

Click image to enlarge

The US government worries that terrorists could take down the country's electrical grid just by hitting a small node in the system. But a new study reveals the grid is too unreliable for that kind of attack.

Last year, network theorists published some papers suggesting that terrorists could take down the entire US electrical grid by attacking a small, remote power station. But new research shows that network theory models, which great for analyzing many complex systems, don't work for patchwork systems like the US electrical grid. Basically, the grid was set up so haphazardly that you'd have to take out a major node before you'd affect the entire thing. The researchers based their conclusions on real-world data from the power grid in the eastern U.S.

io9

Read the scientific paper at Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science