  Increasing amount of wildfires in recent years consistently challenges the
safe and reliable operations of power systems. To prevent power lines and other
electrical components from causing wildfires under extreme conditions, electric
utilities often deploy public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) to mitigate the
wildfire risks therein. Although PSPS are effective countermeasures against
wildfires, uncoordinated strategies can cause disruptions in electricity supply
and even lead to cascading failures. Meanwhile, it is extremely important to
consider mitigating biased decisions on different communities and populations
during the implementation of shutoff actions. In this work, we primarily focus
on the dynamic reconfiguration problem of networked microgrids with distributed
energy resources. In particular, we formulate a rolling horizon optimization
problem allowing for flexible network reconfiguration at each time interval to
mitigate wildfire risks. To promote equity and fairness during the span of
shutoffs, we further enforce a range of constraints associated with load
shedding to discourage disproportionate impact on individual load blocks.
Numerical studies on the modified IEEE 13-bus system and a larger-sized
Smart-DS system demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm towards
more equitable power shutoff operations.
