February 27, 2025

 

We were lucky. If this blackout had occurred on June 25, for example, the already slow commute home we saw last Tuesday would have been compounded by students and many other problems.

“We need more resilient networks.” This phrase has been repeatedly heard in the media since yesterday. The February 25 blackout, which affected eight million households for more than six hours, meant that several municipalities were also unable to use landline and mobile phones. Without the internet, we couldn’t check if our loved ones were safe, let alone work remotely.

Resilience is the ability of a system to recover from failure and adapt to a new scenario. How do we achieve a resilient network? Concepts such as backup systems, robustness, and redundancy quickly come to mind.

However, it is necessary to quantify the impact of service interruptions. Since a system that never fails is economically impossible, we must decide how much failure we are willing to accept and, when it happens, how we will guarantee a certain level of basic service. When failures are concentrated in certain areas, we can mitigate the impact by, for example, transferring patients to other hospitals or, on a more individual level, hosting relatives so they can charge their phones or have dinner. In some way, we can compensate for the risk.

The impact of service interruptions is much greater when we have no one to turn to. In this case, the power grid failure affected the service level of the transportation network, which then led to the failure of the telecommunications network. This increased the impact of the electrical outage because the public transportation system faced higher demand due to the lack of power while operating at reduced capacity.

On the other hand, to coordinate and deal with the power failure, we needed to make phone calls or use the internet to obtain a travel permit. However, the power failure itself prevented us from doing so. In other words, an electrical outage increases the demand on other critical infrastructures while simultaneously weakening their functionality.

Some may believe that it is unlikely we will experience another widespread failure like this. They are wrong. Given that Chile is prone to natural disasters and extreme weather events are on the rise, it is inevitable that large areas will be affected by earthquakes or severe storms.

Not only that, but today we rely on telecommunications for many critical tasks and have electrified much of our consumption. As a result, a power outage now leaves us unable to pay with credit cards, cook, access drinking water, or obtain information, among many other problems.

How much and where should we invest to achieve a resilient power grid? When assessing infrastructure resilience and reliability, we must consider the interdependence of systems—both in how they trigger additional demand and in how simultaneous failures extend repair times and hinder safety measures.

In a country prone to natural disasters like Chile, it is essential to study the trade-offs between the magnitude and frequency of disruptions during such events, allowing us to develop investment strategies for critical infrastructure.

Today, we need network resilience models that account for simultaneous failures in multiple components located in geographically close areas. We must develop models that reflect the interdependencies of critical infrastructure.

This is a widespread issue in China, California, Mexico, and Japan. The scientific community is actively working to propose methods that assist in decision-making and public policy. Transdisciplinary research teams are needed to combine technical aspects, model risks, and assess population needs to define action plans.

Studies have shown that using classical models will lead us to overestimate resilience and make suboptimal investment decisions. Chile has a cutting-edge scientific community capable of developing decision-making models for situations like this. We must take advantage of this human capital.

We were lucky. If this blackout had occurred on June 25, for example, the already slow commute home we saw last Tuesday would have been compounded by students and many other problems. Hopefully, these reflections will take the scientific community into account, and together we can prepare for the next events that will inevitably come.

Courtesy of El Mostrador.