Community consistency determines the stability transition window of power-grid nodes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the stability transition of power-grid nodes depends on community structure and coupling strength, revealing that nodes with low community consistency have longer transition windows.

Contribution

It introduces the relationship between community consistency and basin stability transition windows in power grids, providing a new method to identify critical nodes efficiently.

Findings

Nodes with large transition windows have low community consistency.

Community structure influences the stability transition of power-grid nodes.

A stylized network model reproduces observed stability transition characteristics.

Abstract

The synchrony of electric power systems is important in order to maintain stable electricity supply. Recently, the measure basin stability was introduced to quantify a node's ability to recover its synchronization when perturbed. In this work, we focus on how basin stability depends on the coupling strength between nodes. We use the Chilean power grid as a case study. In general, basin stability goes from zero to one as coupling strength increases. However, this transition does not happen at the same value for different nodes. By understanding the transition for individual nodes, we can further characterize their role in the power-transmission dynamics. We find that nodes with an exceptionally large transition window also have a low community consistency. In other words, they are hard to classify to one community when applying a community detection algorithm. This also gives an efficient way to identify nodes with a long transition window (which is computationally time consuming). Finally, to corroborate these results, we present a stylized example network with prescribed community structures that captures the mentioned characteristics of basin stability transition and recreates our observations.