Global electricity trade network: Structures and implications

College

Gokongwei College of Engineering

Department/Unit

Industrial Engineering

Document Type

Article

Source Title

PLoS ONE

Volume

11

Issue

8

Publication Date

8-1-2016

Abstract

Nations increasingly trade electricity, and understanding the structure of the global power grid can help identify nations that are critical for its reliability. This study examines the global grid as a network with nations as nodes and international electricity trade as links. We analyze the structure of the global electricity trade network and find that the network consists of four sub-networks, and provide a detailed analysis of the largest network, Eurasia. Russia, China, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan have high betweenness measures in the Eurasian sub-network, indicating the degrees of centrality of the positions they hold. The analysis reveals that the Eurasian sub-network consists of seven communities based on the network structure. We find that the communities do not fully align with geographical proximity, and that the present international electricity trade in the Eurasian sub-network causes an approximately 11 million additional tons of CO2 emissions. © 2016 Ji et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Digitial Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1371/journal.pone.0160869

Disciplines

Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering | Power and Energy

Keywords

Electric power production; Electric power distribution; Electric power; Selling—Electric power

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