Emergent Complex Systems — A Utility Can Bring Itself And Grid Down

The in-basket of worries for utility managers is pretty full these days. It contains the growing frequency of severe and extreme weather events, the constant threat of cyber intrusion, the government policy shift from renewables to fossil fuel generation, and the need to find more power to feed the data centers.

Add to those worries, the threat of emergent complex systems to the grid. It is an existential threat and was responsible for the Northeast blackout of 2003, which affected over 50 million people in eight states and the Canadian province of Ontario.

The blackout began on Aug. 14, when a high-voltage power line in Ohio sagged and touched an overgrown tree due to high heat and demand. This caused the line to go out of service.

A software bug in FirstEnergy Corporation’s alarm system failed to alert operators to the line problem, and cascading event got underway. Some customers got their power back within a few hours, but others were without it for a couple of days.

Often-Cited Examples

To computer scientists, physicists, biologists, even social scientists, this was a classic example of emergent complex systems failure. Other often-cited examples are the collapse of Lehman Brothers Inc. in September 2008, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010.

John Savage, the retired head of computer science at Brown University, describes emergent complex systems this way: “An emergent system is a system in which complex organized behavior or properties arise from interactions among simpler components, even though none of the individual components exhibit those complex properties on their own.”

In other words, Savage told me, “Emergence occurs when the whole is more than the sum of its parts — the collective behavior cannot be fully predicted or explained just by analyzing the individual elements in isolation.”

Robert Gardner, who has been a leading researcher and instructor on the behavior of emergent complex systems at the National Security Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and leading universities, told me that any endeavor which relies on complex systems is liable to face an emergent failure, but electric utilities and the financial system are most vulnerable to this danger.

For example, Gardner said, the Lehman Brothers crash in 2008 was instigated by bad actors but exacerbated by the complexity of the counterparty networks that made it a gigantic crisis.

“These so-called Complex Adaptive Systems had no nefarious, adversarial actors to defend against; the complex, heterogeneous nature of the systems themselves led to emergent behaviors — behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining individual components, but are rather produced by the system as a whole, facilitating perfect storms that conspire to enable these catastrophes,” he said.

Other major catastrophes that begin with a perturbation deep in the system but have widespread consequences include the Boeing 737 Max 8 autopilot system problems and the Titanic disaster.

Science of Chaos

Some compare the development of a complex emergent failure to the science of chaos, where a minor action on one continent can affect the weather on another.

Software is always of concern because it has often evolved, and the component codes aren’t necessarily known today. They can be a mystery to those dependent on them.

Axiomatically, the bigger the system, the greater the vulnerability and the more stupendous the consequences. For utilities, the big vulnerability is the grid — all or part of it.

The solutions run to ever-greater awareness, building in resilience and having a system that can shut down in parts defensively, and instantly when an unexplained perturbation in normal operations occurs.

As electricity supply gets more complex, more diversified, the chance of emergent disasters grows. No villains, just cantankerous complexity.

EPRI, the research organization for the electric utility industry, has studied emergent complex systems and leans toward thoroughness and robustness in design with in-depth resilience.

Advocates for microgrids see the relative simplicity of these and the ability to insulate them from the grid as a major advantage. Meanwhile, stuff happens.