RAISE: Wildfire-Resilient Power Grid Infrastructure Planning: Socio-Technical Innovations for Energy and Health Equity

Wildfire-related power outages can significantly impact people, businesses, and larger communities to varying degrees. By bringing together necessary partners, i.e., utility companies, ratepayers, regulators, local agencies, and health and energy organizations, into a community collaborative, this project will study wildfire-related outages, develop actionable solutions, and create a more effective, balanced resilience planning framework. The team will develop an advanced wildfire simulator and outage prediction model that integrates diverse landscapes, community characteristics, and ignition sources. This simulation will provide a realistic prediction of wildfire risks across the entire service area and will serve to fully understand wildfire impacts on both humans and the power grid. Wildfire risk assessment models, combined with grid simulations, will generate new knowledge about how wildfires impact grid components and how utility planning strategies can, in turn, mitigate wildfire risks. This project will establish a community-focused power grid wildfire resilience planning framework that will mitigate wildfire-related outage risks while promoting fair and balanced energy recovery among communities. This approach will integrate area-specific (e.g., census tract) metrics into resilience planning to ensure strategies are technically sound and to promote and to promote equitable distribute of benefits, costs, and burdens. The transdisciplinary team will incorporate the needs and perspectives of various stakeholders who have a tangible and immediate interest in wildfire resilience planning. Both engineering models and community feedback will be integrated into the community-focused framework to ensure that grid-resilience strategies are technically sound and promote the fair distribution of benefits, costs, and burdens of power disruptions. An interactive dashboard among collaborative partners will be used to help understand how utility decisions impact outage risks and their effects on areas of the community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.