Burning Issues: Modeling Risk of Wildfire Ignitions and Power Outages in the Electric Grid

Electric grid faults can be the source of catastrophic wildfires, particularly in regions with high winds and low humidity. In short-term operations, electric utilities have few options to mitigate the risk of wildfire ignitions, leading to use of disruptive measures such as proactive de-energization of equipment, frequently referred to as public safety power shut-offs. Decisions of which lines to turn off and how to bring them back on again has significant impacts on customers, who lose access to electricity in an attempt to protect them from fires. 

This talk discusses two complementary aspects of this problem. First, we will discuss the question of how to optimally balance the negative impacts of both wildfire risk and power outages, before describing how we model this trade-off in our proposed optimal power shut-off problem, an optimization model to support operational decision making in the context of extreme wildfire risk. We will demonstrate that accounting for the size of power outages when deciding which lines to turn off can reduce the size of the power shut-offs compared with simple threshold-based models. Next, we will discuss algorithms for proactive restoration planning that can help re-energize the system faster after a disaster, and how distributed energy resources (DERs) aid in this processes.