This paper introduces a new visualization platform
for investigating cascading failures in power grids. The proposed
visualization platform could let people “watch” the cascading behavior
under different initial triggers, and help them understand
how a failure propagates from one or more local substations to
the whole power grid. In this study, the ArcMap is adopted to take
charge of visualizing a power grid network and the user interface.
All scripts to support this platform, e.g. constructing a power grid
network and simulating cascading failures, are written in Python,
a popular industrial computer language. The power grid around
Bay Area is used to test the proposed visualization platform
and investigate the single node (i.e. substation) failure cases. The
proposed visualization platform successfully demonstrated how
the failure of a node can propagate in the power grid and cause
large-scale power outage.