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Cascading Outage

A sequence of events in which an initial disturbance triggers dependent component outages.

Definition by an IEEE Working Group

Source: 1

A cascading outage is a sequence of events in which an initial disturbance, or a set of disturbances, triggers a sequence of one or more dependent component outages:

  • In some cases they halt before the sequence results in the interruption of electricity service
  • In many case, cascading outages have resulted in massive disruptions to electricity service: Northeast blackouts in 1965 and 2003, New York City blackout in 1977, two WECC blackouts in 1996, Brazil blackout in 2009, WECC blackout in 2011, etc

Last modified: 2025-06-20

Related: cascading

← Cascading · Co-Located Load →

  1. (2014). IEEE Cascading Failures Working Group CFWG. https://www.naspi.org/sites/default/files/2016-09/ieee_vaiman_cascading_failures_20141023.pdf ↩