Dynamically induced cascading failures in power grids

Reliable functioning of infrastructure networks is essential for ourmodern society. Cascading failures are the cause of most large-scalenetwork outages. Although cascading failures often exhibit dynamicaltransients, the modeling of cascades has so far mainly focused on theanalysis of sequences of steady states. In this article, we focus onelectrical transmission networks and introduce a framework that takesinto account both the event-based nature of cascades and the essentialsof the network dynamics. We find that transients of the order of secondsin the flows of a power grid play a crucial role in the emergence ofcollective behaviors. We finally propose a forecasting method toidentify critical lines and components in advance or during operation.Overall, our work highlights the relevance of dynamically inducedfailures on the synchronization dynamics of national power grids ofdifferent European countries and provides methods to predict and modelcascading failures.