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1. Logarithmic Resilience Risk Metrics That Address the Huge Variations in Blackout Cost

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPWRS.2025.3612225  

   Ahmad, Arslan; Dobson, Ian (November 2025, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems)

   Resilience risk metrics must address the customer cost of the largest blackouts of greatest impact. However, there are huge variations in blackout cost in observed distribution utility data that make it impractical to properly estimate the mean large blackout cost and the corresponding risk. These problems are caused by the heavy tail observed in the distribution of customer costs. To solve these problems, we propose resilience metrics that describe large blackout risk using the mean of the logarithm of the cost of large-cost blackouts, the slope index of the heavy tail, and the frequency of large-cost blackouts. 

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2. Tropical cyclone-blackout-heatwave compound hazard resilience in a changing climate

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32018-4  

   Feng, Kairui; Ouyang, Min; Lin, Ning (December 2022, Nature Communications)

   Abstract Tropical cyclones (TCs) have caused extensive power outages. The impacts of TC-caused blackouts may worsen in the future as TCs and heatwaves intensify. Here we couple TC and heatwave projections and power outage and recovery process analysis to investigate how TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard risk may vary in a changing climate, with Harris County, Texas as an example. We find that, under the high-emissions scenario RCP8.5, long-duration heatwaves following strong TCs may increase sharply. The expected percentage of Harris residents experiencing at least one longer-than-5-day TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard in a 20-year period could increase dramatically by a factor of 23 (from 0.8% to 18.2%) over the 21 st century. We also reveal that a moderate enhancement of the power distribution network can significantly mitigate the compound hazard risk. Thus, climate adaptation actions, such as strategically undergrounding distribution network and developing distributed energy sources, are urgently needed to improve coastal power system resilience. 

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3. Hurricane Ida’s blackout-heatwave compound risk in a changing climate

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59737-8  

   Feng, Kairui; Lin, Ning; Gori, Avantika; Xi, Dazhi; Ouyang, Min; Oppenheimer, Michael (May 2025, Nature Communications)

   The emerging tropical cyclone (TC)-blackout-heatwave compound risk under climate change is not well understood. In this study, we employ projections of TCs, sea level rise, and heatwaves, in conjunction with power system resilience modeling, to evaluate historical and future TC-blackout-heatwave compound risk in Louisiana, US. We find that the return period for a compound event comparable to Hurricane Ida (2021), with approximately 35 million customer hours of simultaneous power outage and heatwave exposure in Louisiana, is around 278 years in the historical climate of 1980–2005. Under the SSP5-8.5 emissions scenario, this return period is projected to decrease to 16.2 years by 2070–2100, a ~17 times reduction. Under the SSP2-4.5 scenario, it decreases to 23.1 years, representing a ~12 times reduction. Heatwave intensification is the primary driver of this increased risk, reducing the return period by approximately 5 times under SSP5-8.5 and 3 times under SSP2-4.5. Increased TC activity is the second driver, reducing the return period by 40% and 34% under the respective scenarios. These findings enhance our understanding of compound climate hazards and inform climate adaptation strategies. 

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4. Moby: A Blackout-Resistant Anonymity Network for Mobile Devices

   https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2022-0071  

   Pradeep, Amogh; Javaid, Hira; Williams, Ryan; Rault, Antoine; Choffnes, David; Le Blond, Stevens; Ford, Bryan (July 2022, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies)

   Internet blackouts are challenging environments for anonymity and censorship resistance. Existing popular anonymity networks (e.g., Freenet, I2P, Tor) rely on Internet connectivity to function, making them impracticable during such blackouts. In such a setting, mobile ad-hoc networks can provide connectivity, but prior communication protocols for ad-hoc networks are not designed for anonymity and attack resilience. We address this need by designing, implementing, and evaluating Moby, a blackout-resistant anonymity network for mobile devices. Moby provides end-to-end encryption, forward secrecy and sender-receiver anonymity. It features a bi-modal design of operation, using Internet connectivity when available and ad-hoc networks during blackouts. During periods of Internet connectivity, Moby functions as a regular messaging application and bootstraps information that is later used in the absence of Internet connectivity to achieve secure anonymous communications. Moby incorporates a model of trust based on users’ contact lists, and a trust establishment protocol that mitigates flooding attacks. We perform an empirically informed simulation-based study based on cellphone traces of 268,596 users over the span of a week for a large cellular provider to determine Moby’s feasibility and present our findings. Last, we implement and evaluate the Moby client as an Android app. 

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5. Validating the OPA cascading blackout model on a 19402 bus transmission network with both mesh and tree structures

   https://doi.org/978-0-9981331-2-6  

   Carreras, Benjamin A; Reynolds-Barredo, Jose-Miguel; Dobson, Ian; Newman, David E (January 2019, 52th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences)

   The OPA model calculates the long-term risk of cascading blackouts by simulating cascading outages and the slow process of network upgrade in response to blackouts. We validate OPA on a detailed 19402 bus network model of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) interconnection with publicly available data. To do this, we examine scalings on a series of WECC interconnection models with increasing detail. The most detailed, 19402 bus network has more tree structures at the edges of the main mesh structure, and we extend the OPA model to account for this. The higher-risk cascading outages are the large cascades that extend across interconnections, so validating cascading models on large networks is crucial to understanding how the real grid behaves. Finally, exploring networks with mixed mesh and tree like structure has implications for the risk analysis for both the transmission grid and other network infrastructures. 

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