A Model Design for Risk Assessment of Line Tripping Caused by Wildfires

Abstract

A power line is particularly vulnerable to wildfires in its vicinity, and various damage including line tripping can be caused by wildfires. Using remote sensing techniques, a novel model developed to assess the risk of line tripping caused by the wildfire occurrence in high-voltage power line corridors is presented. This model mainly contains the wildfire risk assessment for power line corridors and the estimation of the probability of line tripping when a wildfire occurs in power line corridors. For the wildfire risk assessment, high-resolution satellite data, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, meteorological data, and digital elevation model (DEM) data were employed to infer the natural factors. Human factors were also included to achieve good reliability. In the estimation of the probability of line tripping, vegetation characteristics, meteorological status, topographic conditions, and transmission line parameters were chosen as influencing factors. According to the above input variables and observed historical datasets, the risk levels for wildfire occurrence and line tripping were obtained with a logic regression approach. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed model can provide good results in predicting wildfire occurrence and line tripping for high-voltage power line corridors.

Monitoring and Risk Assessment of Wildfires in the Corridors of High-Voltage Transmission Lines

“…Existing wildfire warning strategies usually determine the fire risk level according to the distance between the fire point and the line after judging that there is a transmission line corridor around the fire point [5,17,43], which cannot meet the accuracy requirements of the transmission line wildfire warning system. Based on the trip risk assessment in the reference [44], this paper comprehensively considers the meteorological elements, underlying surface elements, topographic elements and power grid elements that may affect the spread of wildfires and triggering wildfire tripping of transmission lines, and proposes a comprehensive fire risk assessment strategy based on variable weight coefficients. Practical results show that this strategy can provide scientific basis for operation and maintenance personnel, and can reduce about 70% of the workload during the high-incidence period of wildfires.…”

Fault Statistics and Analysis of 220-kV and Above Transmission Lines in a Southern Coastal Provincial Power Grid of China

“…Transmission line wildfires pose a serious threat to the power grid [12]. Wildfires is determined by two factors: fire source and meteorological conditions [13].…”

A wildfire occurrence risk model based on a back-propagation neural network-optimized genetic algorithm

“…Electric power transmission lines often cross wildlands with complex terrain and high vegetation coverage. However, due to natural and human activities, such regions are prone to wildfires (Guo et al, 2018;Shi et al, 2018). As soon as these spread to transmission corridors, high temperatures, ash, and flame greatly deteriorate the insulating strength of air below and between transmission lines to induce tripping failures in the power system.…”