Full Title: Power System Wildfire Risks and Potential Solutions: A Literature Review & Proposed Metric
Author(s): Nadia Panossian and Tarek Elgindy
Publisher(s): National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Publication Date: June 27, 2023
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
More than 10 million acres burned in 2020 from nearly 60,000 fires across the United States
the second highest burned acreage on record, with the top five years on record all occurring in the last 15 years. There has been and will continue to be an increase in the instances and impacts of wildfires, as well as other extreme weather events, as a result of climate change. These extreme weather events, including wildfires, often cause widespread power outages either directly when existing fires cause faults, indirectly when operators de-energize lines to assure safety of first responders near an existing fire, or indirectly when operators de-energize lines to prevent an ignition during a high fire risk period.
There are several methods of fire risk quantification, fire tracking, and fire risk management, with a few methods that put that risk in the context of power system interactions; however, a metric for the risk of power system components igniting a wildfire is missing from the literature. Transmission lines specifically are susceptible to faults from wildfires, but power systems can also cause wildfires by creating ignition points in susceptible areas.
This paper reviews current methods of quantifying and managing wildfire risks as well as forecasting, tracking, and suppressing wildfires as they affect and are affected by power systems.