Mitigating the Impact of Uncertain Wildfire Risk on Power Grids through Topology Control

Abstract: Wildfires pose a significant threat to the safe and reliable operations of the electric grid. To mitigate wildfire risk, system operators resort to public safety power shutoffs, or PSPS, that shed load for a subset of customers. As wildfire risk forecasts are stochastic, such decision-making may often be sub-optimal. This paper proposes a two-stage topology control problem that jointly minimizes generation and load-shedding costs in the face of uncertain fire risk. Compared to existing work, we include preand post-event topology control actions and consider scenarios where the wildfire risk is known with low and high confidence. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using a benchmark test system, artificially geo-located in Southern California, and using stochastic wildfire risk data that exists in the literature. Our work provides a crucial study of the comparative benefits of pre-event versus post-event control and the effects of wildfire risk accuracy on each control strategy.