- Aug. 26, 2026, 3:30 pm US/Central
- Mihai Anitescu
Power system reliability hinges on rare but consequential events — weather-driven generation scarcity and cascading failures from single outages — yet planning and operations rarely account for these tails in a principled, tractable way. This talk presents two complementary steps toward closing that gap.
For planning, we characterize regional resource adequacy, showing that a statistical model, Gaussian conditional on weather, fits the tails of the generation scarcity distribution remarkably well, giving an efficient adequacy-risk measure with implications for current and future U.S. generation portfolios.
For operations, we target cascading failures — the dominant cause of blackouts, yet largely ignored in standard dispatch. Our Failure Probability-constrained ACOPF (FP-ACOPF) uses an analytical failure-probability model and the system’s expected first-failure time as a tunable cascade-risk signature, solved efficiently via bilevel optimization. On the IEEE 118-bus system, it substantially cuts severe-cascade and demand-loss probabilities versus N-1 secure dispatch, at modest added cost.
Together, these results sketch a reliability paradigm built on tractable statistical models of extreme risk.