Self-organized criticality model predicts Texas grid failures

Researchers present a new SOC-based predictive framework for assessing power grid vulnerability, applied to Texas grid outage data from 2014–2022.

• Method tracks power-law critical exponents in outage size distributions, showing a decline from 1.45 (2018) to 0.95 (2020) and then 0.62 (2021), with values dropping below the theoretical critical threshold α = 1 approximately 6–12 months before the February 2021 Texas power crisis.
• The framework, accepted for presentation at the 2025 MRS International Risk Conference (July, Boston, MA, US), is proposed as a quantitative early-warning tool for catastrophic infrastructure failures to support grid resilience planning, risk assessment, and emergency preparedness in stressed power systems.