Resilience assessment of power transmission system during wildfire disasters considering spread process

Abstract

Abstract Large‐scale wildfires can significantly reduce the air gap insulation resistance of high‐voltage transmission lines and cause chain tripping incidents. To assess the resilience of the power transmission system during wildfire, this paper proposes a resilience assessment framework for transmission system that considers the entire process of wildfire disaster. Firstly, a wildfire spread model, considering multiple influencing factors, is developed based on the cellular automaton. Based on the air gap breakdown mechanism during wildfires, the trip‐out probability of transmission lines is calculated, and various failure scenarios are obtained by using the Monte Carlo sampling. Secondly, considering the geographical location of failures, maintenance personnel schedules and restoration time, a power transmission system restoration model is established. Thus, a resilience assessment method for power transmission system during wildfire disasters is proposed. Finally, IEEE RTS‐79 transmission system is taken as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed resilience assessment method. The results show that the proposed method can effectively calculate the wildfire spread tendency and transmission line's trip‐out probability. Furthermore, three typical resilience improvement measures are quantitatively analysed, which provides a quantifiable reference for the power sector to formulate prevention and recovery strategies for extreme wildfire disasters.

Keywords

• disasters
• power transmission lines
• risk analysis
• wildfires