  Wildfires are a threat to public safety and have increased in both frequency
and severity due to climate change. To mitigate wildfire ignition risks,
electric power system operators proactively de-energize high-risk power lines
during "public safety power shut-off" (PSPS) events. Line de-energizations can
cause communities to lose power, which may result in negative economic, health,
and safety impacts. Furthermore, the same communities may repeatedly experience
power shutoffs over the course of a wildfire season, which compounds these
negative impacts. However, there may be many combinations of power lines whose
de-energization will result in about the same reduction of system-wide wildfire
risk, but the associated power outages affect different communities. Therefore,
one may raise concerns regarding the fairness of de-energization decisions.
Accordingly, this paper proposes a framework to select lines to de-energize in
order to balance wildfire risk reduction, total load shedding, and fairness
considerations. The goal of the framework is to prevent a small fraction of
communities from disproportionally being impacted by PSPS events, and to
instead more equally share the burden of power outages. For a geolocated test
case in the southwestern United States, we use actual California demand data as
well as real wildfire risk forecasts to simulate PSPS events during the 2021
wildfire season and compare the performance of various methods for promoting
fairness. Our results demonstrate that the proposed formulation can provide
significantly more fair outcomes with limited impacts on system-wide
performance.
