Monitoring and Risk Assessment of Wildfires in the Corridors of High-Voltage Transmission Lines

Yu Liang,Ruizeng Wei,Jie Chen,Yong Huang,Lawu Zhou,Enze Zhou

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3023024

Abstract

The scale of China's power grid is becoming larger and larger, more and more high-voltage long-distance overhead transmission lines are exposed to the wild environment. Wildfire disasters seriously threaten the safety and stability of transmission lines. In order to monitor and warn the fire points that may affect the operation of the transmission line in advance, this research is carried out. Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) polar orbiting satellite and Himawari-8 geostationary satellite are used to monitor wildfires in a complementary manner, combined with improved relative threshold and adaptive dynamic threshold to identify fire points based on background radiation information. Then, a fire risk assessment system based on the entropy weight method and variable weight theory for transmission line corridors was constructed from four aspects: meteorology, underlying surface, topography and power grid. Engineering practice shows that the method proposed in this study effectively monitors and scientifically warns wildfires in the transmission line corridor, which greatly reduces the losses and working pressure caused by wildfires.

Highlights

The imbalance of China’s energy distribution pattern and economic development level requires the use of long-distance transmission lines to transfer electrical energy from the power generation center to the load center
The wildfire monitoring and warning method based on multisource satellites for transmission lines is proposed in this paper, It has been applied to the wildfire monitoring system of the transmission line of China Southern Power Grid
This paper proposes a complementary monitoring method of wildfires in transmission line corridors based on satellite remote sensing technology

Summary

Introduction

The imbalance of China’s energy distribution pattern and economic development level requires the use of long-distance transmission lines to transfer electrical energy from the power generation center to the load center. High-voltage transmission lines are usually set up in double or multiple circuits on the same tower. Wildfires may cause multiple circuits to trip simultaneously or successively, and reclosing is often difficult to succeed. Manual power transmission can only be carried out after the thick smoke dissipates, so the line shutdown time caused by wildfires is generally longer [2]. Historical data shows that the forced shutdown faults caused by wildfire accounted for 79% and 64% of the total faults in the 220kV and 500kV line forced shutdowns for more than 30 minutes [3].

Results

Discussion

Conclusion