Tradeoffs in Power Grid Operation During a Public Safety Power Shutoff

Abstract

This thesis considers challenges associated with managing the risk of wildfires caused by electric utilities, specifically the use of deliberate, and potentially widespread, power outages termed Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events. A PSPS event is a way to reduce potential liability in utility-associated wildfires, but it also creates additional dangers and economic hardships for utility customers. This thesis performs three modeling and analysis tasks: (1) it presents an extensive exploratory data analysis on the Pacific Gas and Electric (PG and E) power grid, utility-caused ignitions, and past PSPS events; (2) it develops models to gain insight on the PG and E decision process during PSPS events; and (3) using power outage studies and economic models, it estimates the social cost of PSPS events.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2020
Accession Number
AD1127175

Entities

People

  • Andrea L. De Abreu

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • C Programming Language
  • California
  • Computer Programming
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Mining
  • Department Of Defense
  • Electrical Equipment
  • Geographic Information Systems
  • Information Science
  • Linear Programming
  • Operations Research
  • Reliability
  • Risk
  • Risk Analysis
  • Supervised Machine Learning
  • United States
  • Urban Areas

Readers

  • Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
  • Military/Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Technology
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.