Special Seminar: Wildfire Risk Mitigation and Data-Driven Methods for Electric Power Systems

ZOOM LINK
Meeting ID: 913 9744 0830
Passcode: 645291

The electric power grid of the future faces many challenges, including rapidly increasing quantities of renewable generation and growing threats from extreme weather events, which necessitate the development of new computational tools. The first part of this talk will focus on one extreme weather event: elevated wildfire ignition risk. Wildfire risk mitigation is a critical consideration in regions like the Western United States, where, historically, electric power systems have ignited some of the most destructive wildfires. To reduce the risk of igniting a wildfire, power system operators preemptively de-energize high-risk power lines during extreme wildfire conditions as part of "Public Safety Power Shutoff" (PSPS) events. However, PSPS events can also result in significant power loss to customers, leading to the need for new operation and planning decision-making algorithms for power systems experiencing high wildfire risk.

The second part of the talk will focus on the specialized and targeted use of data-driven methods to increase the accuracy and computation speeds of power systems decision-making algorithms. The talk will conclude by outlining opportunities for the use of targeted data-driven methods to aid in wildfire risk mitigation algorithms, and for resilience decision-making for power systems in general.

About the Speaker(s)

Alyssa Kody
Assistant Professor of ECE, NC State University

Alyssa Kody is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on developing control and optimization algorithms for power and energy systems. Previously, she was a Maria Goeppert Mayer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and was named a 2022 Rising Star in EECS. She received her PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where her thesis was on developing control systems for self-powered technologies. Her graduate work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Rackham Merit Fellowship.

Contact

For more information, contact Ashley Parker at ashley.l.parker@dartmouth.edu.