Wildfire Risk Evaluation Framework for Grid Operations and Planning

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change indicators show a long-term trend of increased annual wildfire activity, larger wildfire size, and more variable dynamics in wildfire behavior. This has caused more frequent preemptive public safety power shutoff (PSPS) events in the regions with recognized high wildfire risk. These preemptive power shutoffs attempt to prevent ignition of a wildfire by removing transmission lines from operation, which can result in disruption of electrical service to downstream communities. As wildfires and PSPS events become more frequent, it is crucial to identify which communities are most at risk of experiencing extended blackout in order to adequately plan for and mitigate these impacts. To that end, this paper proposes the Wildfire Risk Estimation for Energy Systems (WiRES) framework, a novel performance-based framework that translates extreme weather-related and PSPS event probabilities into a cumulative probability of transmission line outages in the grid. This study also led to development of a geospatial visualization tool that breaks down the entire Western Electricity Coordinating Council region into 50 km grid cells that can be used to 1) filter out transmission lines with higher than a user-defined threshold outage probability, and 2) graphically discover the affected regions and their biophysical and socioeconomic metrics. Lastly, an impact assessment study is conducted which connects the results of the proposed framework to a contingency analysis to highlight the applicability of the framework.