Seminar Series | Managing Wildfire Risk in Electric Grid Operations: Optimization Formulations and Solution Algorithms

Speaker: Line Roald, University of Wisconsin—Madison

Title: Managing Wildfire Risk in Electric Grid Operations: Optimization Formulations and Solution Algorithms 

Abstract: In recent years, the interactions between electric grid operations and wildfires have come into sharp focus, as several very deadly and destructive wildfires were ignited by power lines. In this talk, we will discuss optimization problem formulations that allow grid operators to optimize grid investments and operations to (1) proactively address the risk of wildfire ignitions and (2) restore the system as quickly as possible after the event is over. This is a highly challenging problem, both from a modeling perspective (wildfire ignitions are low probability, high impact events!) and from a solution perspective (giving rise to large scale, mixed integer problems). We will show that optimized solutions can significantly improve outcomes compared with simple heuristics, and discuss efficient solution algorithms.  

Bio: Line Roald is an Assistant Professor and Grainger Institute Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of Wisconsin—Madison. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering (2016) from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to joining UW Madison, she was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Center of Non-Linear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the UW Madison ECE Outstanding Graduate Mentor award. Her research interests center around modeling and optimization of energy systems, with a particular focus on managing uncertainty and risk from extreme weather and renewable energy variability.

References - Wildfire risk mitigation:

N. Rhodes, L. Ntaimo and L. Roald, "Balancing Wildfire Risk and Power Outages Through Optimized Power Shut-Offs," in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 3118-3128, July 2021. Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9305959

Sofia Taylor, Line A. Roald, “A framework for risk assessment and optimal line upgrade selection to mitigate wildfire risk,” Electric Power Systems Research, Volume 213, 2022,

108592. Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378779622006794

References – Power system restoration:

Noah Rhodes, David M. Fobes, Carleton Coffrin, Line Roald, “PowerModelsRestoration.jl: An open-source framework for exploring power network restoration algorithms”, Electric Power Systems Research, Volume 190, 2021.

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378779620305393

Noah Rhodes, Carleton Coffrin, Line Roald, “Recursive restoration refinement: A fast heuristic for near-optimal restoration prioritization in power systems”, Electric Power Systems Research, Volume 212, 2022.
Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378779622005934