Local vs . global redundancy – trade - offs between resilience against cascading failures and frequency stability

When designing or extending electricity grids, both frequency stability and resilience against cascading failures have to be considered amongst other aspects of energy security and economics such as construction costs due to total line length. Here, we compare an improved simulation model for cascading failures with state-of-the-art simulation models for short-term grid dynamics. Random ensembles of realistic power grid topologies are generated using a recent model that allows for a tuning of global vs local redundancy. The former can be measured by the algebraic connectivity of the network, whereas the latter can be measured by the networks transitivity. We show that, while frequency stability of an electricity grid benefits from a global form of redundancy, resilience against cascading failures rather requires a more local form of redundancy and further analyse the corresponding trade-off.