Evaluating Undergrounding Decisions for Wildfire Ignition Risk Mitigation across Multiple Hazards

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how undergrounding power lines for wildfire risk reduction affects resilience against various natural hazards like wildfires, hurricanes, and wind, emphasizing the importance of multi-hazard optimization for infrastructure investments.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-hazard assessment framework for undergrounding decisions, highlighting the limitations of single-hazard optimization in improving overall resilience.

Findings

Undergrounding for wildfire risk does not necessarily improve resilience against hurricanes.

Single-hazard optimization may lead to suboptimal multi-hazard resilience.

Co-optimization across multiple hazards is essential for effective infrastructure hardening.

Abstract

With electric power infrastructure increasingly susceptible to impacts from climate-driven natural disasters, there is an increasing need for optimization algorithms that determine where to harden the power grid. Prior work has primarily developed optimal hardening approaches for specific acute disaster scenarios. Given the extensive costs of hardening the grid, it is important to understand how a particular set of resilience investments will perform under multiple types of natural hazards. Using a large-scale test case representing the Texas power system, this paper aims to understand how line undergrounding investment decisions made for wildfire ignition risk mitigation perform during a range of wildfire, hurricane, and wind events. Given the varying geographical spread and damage profile of these events, we show that investment decisions made to address one type of natural disaster do not necessarily improve broader resilience outcomes, supporting the need for co-optimization across a range of hazards.