Resilience enhancement program in smart grids by coordinating demand response and optimal reconfiguration during wildfires

Power grids have experienced significant damage and disruption due to wildfires. The spread of wildfires affects the electricity grid by reducing the transmission capacity of overhead lines while decreasing the efficiency of power plants. When wildfires spread, the main challenges are to change the network configuration and manage power consumption to improve network resilience. Network reconfiguration is accomplished by switching transmission lines and changing the network topology. Energy consumption management is also conducted using demand response (DR) methods. However, load prioritization has received less attention in DR methods. The purpose of this paper is to improve the resilience of the power grid against wildfires by introducing a framework for grid recovery and providing power for high-priority loads. For this purpose, a novel multi-objective optimization problem is proposed, which considers optimal topology and DR programs, and aims to maximize the restored critical loads and network flexibility. In the proposed framework, the spread of fire is also considered in a probabilistic form. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by simulating on the 33-bus test systems.