UAF Researcher Offers Expertise in Power Grid Blackouts

Submitted by Carla Browning
Phone: (907) 474-7778
08/22/03

UAF researcher David Newman is involved in a collaboration with fellow researchers Ben Carreras, Oak Ridge National lab and Ian Dobson, University of Wisconsin Madison. They have been working for a number of years on modeling cascading blackouts from the point of view of the entire complex system and analyzing the past history of blackouts in the U.S. Using these models and analysis they are trying to determine what types of situations cause the large cascading failures, what the effect of different corrective actions would be and what the general probability of large blackouts is in a large power transmission system.

The researchers were interviewed recently by ABC’s Nightline, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal.

David Newman, UAF Physics Department can be reached at (907) 474-7858 and ffden@uaf.edu.