Collaborative Research: RAPID: Wildfire Resilience On Hawaiian Islands: Risk-Aware EmergeNcy PArtial Microgrid Shutoff (OHANA)

This RAPID project aims to address how electric utilities, particularly those serving isolated and remote areas, can securely deactivate the vulnerable segments of their power grids during wildfire events while ensuring that essential home medical assistive devices maintain adequate power during the shutdown periods. This problem is more significant for Hawaii, given its island geography, recent destructive wildfires, and aging population.

The intellectual merit of this project lies in its innovative approach to advancing the knowledge of how vulnerable portions of an electric utility microgrid can be deenergized while minimizing the life-threatening risks of outages. The broader impacts of this project are that even modest improvements in wildfire resilience of the electricity infrastructure can result in substantial financial savings and mitigation of adverse social, psychological, and physical consequences of wildfires.

Additionally, this project will create materials for educating electric utility emergency operators while disseminating the results via media outlets.

The project has three main tasks. Tasks 1 compiles a comprehensive list of electric-powered home medical equipment through time-sensitive data collection, surveys, and interviews. Task 2 identifies flexible grid resources, dynamic microgrid reconfiguration strategies, and hidden capacities for safe deenergization of vulnerable portions of the grid before, during, and after wildfires.

Task 3 proposes a novel time-triggered de-energization framework that accounts for both primary and secondary feeders within a microgrid to enable an in-depth exploration of the technical constraints involved in partial deenergization. Studies will be done to investigate scenarios involving vulnerable load points, varying levels of accessible backup and mobile resources, and a diverse spectrum of available flexibilities.

The main deliverables include generating datasets, documentation of the proposed strategy, and validation of results.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.