Integrating Wildfires Propagation Prediction Into Early Warning of Electrical Transmission Line Outages

Wildfires could pose a significant danger to electrical transmission lines and cause considerable losses to the power grids and residents nearby. Previous studies of preventing wildfire damages to electrical transmission lines mostly analyze wildfire and power system security independently due to their differences in disciplines and cannot satisfy the requirement of the power grid for active and timely responses. In this paper, we have designed an integrated wildfire early warning system framework for power grids, taking prediction of wildfires and early warning of line outage probability together. First, the proposed model simulates the spatiotemporal process of wildfires via a geography cellular automata model and predicts when and where wildfires initially get into the security buffer of an electrical transmission line. It is developed in the context of electrical transmission line operating with various situations of topography, vegetation, wind and, especially, multiple ignition points. Second, we have proposed a line outage model (LOM), based on wildfire prediction and breakdown mechanisms of the air gap, to predict the breakdown probability varying with time and the most vulnerable poles at the holistic line scale. Finally, to illustrate the validation and rationality of our proposed system, a case study for a 500-kV transmission line near Miyi county, China, is presented, and the results under various wildfire situations are studied and compared. By integrating wildfire prediction into the LOM and alarming the holistic line breakdown probability along time, this paper makes a significant contribution in the early warning system to prevent transmission lines to be damaged by wildfires, illustrating the related breakdown mechanisms at the line operation level rather than laboratory experiments only. Meanwhile, the implementation of cellular automata model under comprehensive environmental conditions and simulation of the breakdown probability for the 500-kV transmission line could serve as references for other studies in the community.