Equitably allocating wildfire resilience investments for power grids: The curse of aggregation and vulnerability indices
arxiv(2024)
摘要
Wildfires ignited by power systems infrastructure are among the most
destructive wildfires; hence some utility companies in wildfire-prone regions
have pursued a proactive policy of emergency power shutoffs. These shutoffs,
while mitigating the risk of disastrous ignition events, result in power
outages that could negatively impacts vulnerable communities. In this paper, we
consider how to equitably allocate funds to underground and effectively de-risk
power lines in transmission networks. We explore the impact of the 2021 White
House resource allocation policy called the Justice40 initiative, which states
that 40
go to socially vulnerable communities. The definition of what constitutes a
vulnerable community varies by organization, and we consider two major recently
proposed vulnerability indices: the Justice40 index created under the 2021
White House and the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) developed by the Center
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We show that allocating budget
according to these two indices fails to reduce power outages for indigenous
communities and those subject to high wildfire ignition risk using a
high-fidelity synthetic power grid dataset that matches the key features of the
Texas transmission system. We discuss how aggregation of communities and "one
size fits all" vulnerability indices might be the reasons for the misalignment
between the goals of vulnerability indices and their realized impact in this
particular case study. We provide a method of achieving an equitable investment
plan by adding group-level protections on percentage of load that is shed
across each population group of interest.
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