Scrambling on Electrical Power Grids

Deregulated, the U.S. electrical power grid system has shown the emergence of behaviors that include scrambling by buyers to purchase electricity and unexpected increasing costs of electricity to consumers. To infer those behaviors, in this paper, we adapt a theoretical framework, developed by Newman in his work on spread of epidemic disease on networks, to the propagation of electricity buying and selling in a power grid system. Specifically, we represent the electrical power grid as a random bipartite graph of electricity sellers and buyers, which is then projected to a one-mode network of interacting buyers. The so-called transaction transferability among buyers is calculated as a function of the offered buying prices. The average number of buyers scrambling to buy electricity is obtained as a function of the transaction transferability. Together, the transaction transferability and the average number of scrambling buyers indicate that scrambles for electricity buying drive up costs to buyers.