Fig. 1: Probability distributions of primary line failures and final power outages.
From: Increasing the resilience of the Texas power grid against extreme storms by hardening critical lines
a, Probability distribution ρ of the total number of wind-induced line failures Np as generated by the probabilistic line failure model for each of the seven recent TCs hitting Texas. The storms are categorized according to the Saffir–Simpson scale (number in brackets behind the storms’ names), and tropical storms that did not reach hurricane strength at landfall are denoted by TS. TCs are sorted according to the means of the distributions μp, which are indicated as solid vertical lines. The mean numbers of damaged lines for Hurricane Harvey (105) and Hurricane Ike (90) are very close to the reported numbers in the high-voltage (115 kv to 500 kV) transmission grid (106 for Harvey and about 97 for Ike). b, Probability distribution of the associated total power outage Pout after TC passage. The dashed vertical lines prout indicate the reported power outages listed in Supplementary Table 1, and the solid vertical lines Pout represent the means. The inset highlights large cascading failures that can also occur for the less impactful TCs. Methods provides the model parameters used in the simulations. Each storm is presented with the same colour in a and b.
