us and for the developing world. Doing so is going to require many new
developments in the mathematical sciences.
The power grid itself is getting pushed to its limits as demand continues toincrease faster than capacity. Getting close to the limit increases the vulnerability
of the grid. In 2003, a tree fell on a power line, and the human operators of the
grid didn’t notice the problem. The result was that the excess power went to
another line, which became overloaded and failed. That caused even more
power to go to a third line, causing its failure. At that point, a cascade of outages
began that ended up making the entire northeastern U.S. and Canada go dark
for days and cost billions as the lack of electricity snarled traffic, stopped
subways and interrupted communication. Increasing the robustness of the grid is
critical to prevent such costly mistakes.
Figure 15: The increasingly complex distribution network for electricity carries creates both
increasing vulnerabilities and an increasing ability to manage the system to catch anomalies
early. Credit: Jeffrey G. Katz
Doing so is tricky because the power grid wasn’t planned; it evolved inresponse to the needs of the community, and is in constant flux. As the
complexity of the system grows and it is pushed closer to its maximum capacity,