Power Grid Resilience under Wildfire: A Review on Challenges and Solutions

This paper studies the potential impacts of wildfires on the electric power grid, and explores the challenges and solutions for reducing the intensity, duration and impact of this unfavorable event on the grid. To this end, the paper overviews the efforts toward impact analysis and risk evaluation of wildfire and forecasting models to estimate the wildfire damages. Then the solutions to improve different aspects of grid resilience including robustness, resourcefulness, rapid recovery and adaptability are discussed. The mitigation solutions are categorized in four groups including situational awareness, preventive activities, corrective responses, and restorative actions. The state-of-the-art methodologies and algorithms in each category are presented. Challenges and future research opportunities are also discussed in the paper.