Minimizing the reliability trade-off in wildfires risk mitigation

One of the major concerns of electric power utilities in recent years is mitigating wildfire risks. While different mitigations have been proposed and some are implemented, customer experience is less focused in some methods, and not even considered in some extreme methods. This paper focuses on minimizing such tradeoff: reliability vs. wildfire risk reduction. This paper first proposes a methodology to quantify the wildfire risk raised by electric distribution systems, utilizing the vegetation factor at proper locations as well as the probability of fault. An optimization framework is then developed in this work that considers system reliability improvement in decision-making while reducing the risk of wildfires. The means to achieve such optimization are reclosers and fuses: optimally locate them to minimize the wildfire risk while the negative impact on reliability is minimized. Both fuse-blowing and saving schemes are investigated in this work. Moreover, the temporary and permanent types of faults are taken into account by formulating their impact on the operation of reclosers and fuses in both fuse-blowing and saving schemes. The optimization framework utilizes the exchange market algorithm (EMA) to find optimal results. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by utilizing a modified IEEE 123 node system.