Abstract
Managing the risk of wildfires has been arguably the biggest recent challenge of electric utilities with infrastructure located in the wildland-urban interface. Utilities are deploying solutions for wildfire risk mitigation, such as public safety power shutoffs, which are counter-intuitive from a reliability-centric operation paradigm. This article presents an overview of the challenges, implications, and potential strategies for wildfire risk mitigation in power systems, and introduces the vision for a wildfire-resilient power system. The wildfire risk management strategies presented in this article range from fault prevention methods such as structural hardening, vegetation management and implementing advanced protection systems, to arc-suppression and ignition prevention methods. This article also identifies relevant research opportunities associated with implementing wildfire mitigation techniques on power systems.
Highlights
T HOUSANDS of miles of power lines have been developed in arid wildland-urban interface to provide electricity service to rural and remote communities
MITIGATION RESEARCH DIRECTION This article provided a comprehensive overview of wildfire risk mitigation techniques for power systems
The risk mitigation techniques are categorized according to their function in mitigating wildfires as: 1) Fault Prevention, 2) Arc-Ignition Prevention, and 3) Fire Response and Impact Mitigation
Summary
T HOUSANDS of miles of power lines have been developed in arid wildland-urban interface to provide electricity service to rural and remote communities. The authors in [11] propose a method to quantify the resilience of an infrastructure system by measuring its ability to: 1) resist or prevent hazards, 2) absorb initial damage, and 3) recover to normal operation This process has been expended in [12]–[14], and a series of resilience metrics have been developed based on measuring the power system’s performance over time. Recent wildfire events in Australia and California highlight the need for resilience-centric research literature to consider planning and operation strategies based on approaching wildfires, and investigate mitigating catastrophic wildfire ignitions caused by power systems.
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