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Near Real-Time Updated Wildfire Risk Map Model Informed by Powerline Fault Status
Near Real-Time Updated Wildfire Risk Map Model Informed by Powerline Fault Status
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a grant from the NASA to advance power grid and pre-fire situational awareness by integrating fire-ignition electrical fault data with high-resolution Earth observations of ecological and biophysical factors.
In recent years, the growing risk of wildfires associated with electrical infrastructure has become a major national concern. Power lines frequently rank among the leading causes of wildfires. From 2014 to 2022, equipment owned by California's three largest utilities sparked more than 4,946 fires. Investigations reveal that these "electrical wildfires," ignited by power lines and electrical equipment, are among the most devastating. For instance, the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California's history, was caused by power lines. It burned 153,336 acres, destroyed 18,804 structures, and resulted in at least 85 civilian fatalities, according to a report released by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE). Northwest Oklahoma wildfire, Thomas, and Witch wildland fires that are among the top largest wildfires in Oklahoma, were ignited by powerlines, and burned 55,308, 281,893, and 197,990, respectively. To manage this risk effectively, it is crucial to systematically understand the mechanisms by which electrical infrastructure ignites wildfires.
The project intends to develop an operational approach for assessing the risk of wildfires caused by electrical infrastructure and updating wildfire danger ratings in near-real time. One of the project's innovations involves combining experimental fire ignition tests with a medium-voltage test rig connected to a power-hardware-in-the-loop grid simulation. The team will analyze the dynamics and propagation patterns of ignition and non-ignition electrical faults, creating a comprehensive database. This database will then be used to estimate ignition probabilities using machine learning techniques.
Collaboration will play a key role in the project through the invaluable support and specialized knowledge that each investigator and stakeholder including electric utilities, forestry services, fire departments, fire management agencies, and an insurance company, will bring.
Enhancing Oklahoma Community Climate Resilience Through Electric School Bus Integration into Local Energy Grids
Enhancing Oklahoma Community Climate Resilience Through Electric School Bus Integration into Local Energy Grids
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a grant from the NSF to enhance community resilience against climate disasters by integrating Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G)-equipped electric school buses (ESBs) into distribution power grids.
In Oklahoma, the increasing frequency of climate-related disruptions, including tornadoes, storms, floods, and extreme heat, leads to extensive power outages, emphasizing the urgent need for enhanced resilience in Oklahoma power systems. The power grid is also undergoing a transformation into a decarbonized system in response to critical environmental issues. While traditional energy resources (e.g., diesel generators) provide some backup, they often lack the cost-benefit efficiency and sustainability. The innovative Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology enables electric vehicles (EV) batteries to return energy to the grid, thereby providing a viable solution to increase grid resilience and manage demand peaks more efficiently.
This project seeks to enhance community resilience against climate and environmental instabilities by integrating the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology equipped with electric school buses (ESBs) into Oklahoma energy grids. V2G technology allows these ESBs to supply power back to the grid, offering a sustainable energy solution. This initiative aims to flip the community-university dynamic and empower civic partners to co-design a research-to-innovation solution to improving grid resilience during emergencies, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and promote public health. By showcasing the benefits of V2G in a real-world setting, the project could serve as a model for other regions. This work aligns with NSF's mission to promote the progress of science by investing in research to expand knowledge in science, engineering and education. This work is not only critical for addressing immediate climate-related challenges but also for building a resilient and sustainable future for communities.
Rural Scholars: Students Encountering Research and Extension through Rural Community Engagement
Rural Scholars: Students Encountering Research and Extension through Rural Community Engagement
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a grant from the USDA to increase the number and diversity of students knowledgeable and skilled in rural renewal through research and extension projects in the power and energy area.
Rural community development and renewal require new and innovative approaches, which depart from traditional methods that have proved inadequate. Sustained, grassroots, and participatory research and extension approaches have demonstrated success in rural renewal. Currently, there is a dearth of interdisciplinary research and extension training programs related to rural community renewal at the undergraduate level. Therefore, there is a need to provide summer research and extension experiences in energy, food, and agricultural sciences to expand the skilled workforce related to rural renewal and increase persistence to graduate programs.
To this end this project aims to increase the number and diversity of students skilled in rural renewal through research and extension experiences embedded in rural communities. We will achieve this through four objectives. Objective 1: Promote collaborative ties between students’ institutions and OSU, creating a basis for future cooperative studies. Objective 2: Expand the number and diversity of future professionals in both research and extension by recruiting at least 50% of participants from minority serving or primarily undergraduate institutions. Objective 3: Embed students into rural communities through an 11-week research and extension experience.
One project example conducted by rural scholars involves examining the benefits and challenges of co-locating solar photovoltaics (PV) and agriculture, known as agrivoltaics. While initial findings suggest that agrivoltaics can provide economic advantages for farmers and rural communities, numerous technical and non-technical issues remain unresolved. Gaining a deeper understanding of agricultural practices and solar PV system operations, as well as their interactions, is crucial for the effective design and development of agrivoltaic systems. Scholars will engage in hands-on research on innovative agricultural and renewable energy technologies, utilizing data science and analytics to assess the performance of agrivoltaic systems.
Advanced Operation of the Solar-Plus-Storage System in Distribution Systems: Improving Electric Grid Reliability, Efficiency, and Resilience
Advanced Operation of the Solar-Plus-Storage System in Distribution Systems: Improving Electric Grid Reliability, Efficiency, and Resilience
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a grant from California Energy Commission (CEC) to demonstrate the advanced operation of a residential, solar-plus-storage system. The system covers 15 different residential sites that reside in a minimum of three different climate zones across California.
The current power grid faces a future for which it was not designed. This includes dealing with a rapidly aging infrastructure that threatens grid resilience and reliability due to the additional burden placed on the grid by the adoption of high power-consumption loads, such as electric vehicles (EVs), and high variability in power supply due to the integration of renewable energy resources (RES). Although the intermittent nature of RES is a challenge for grid operation, paring RES (e.g. solar photovoltaics) with energy storage brings new opportunities to manage the grid. RES, energy storage, and power electronics are assets that can address future power system challenges by providing grid services, traditionally reserved for conventional generation resources such as peaking units. Proper coordination and operation of behind-the-meter (BTM) assets allow for demand side management and grid services. The net result is an improvement in electric grid reliability, efficiency, resilience, and sustainability.
This project will develop and implement a test site and demonstration program for optimal operation of autonomous, plug-and-play, BTM solar-plus-battery units to perform demand side management (e.g. load shifting, peak shaving, and maximizing solar self-utilization) and grid services. Each unit, called PQ-CU, is based on solid-state-technology, supported by a small-scale solar cell and battery, as well as an advanced control mechanism, allowing dynamic operation of the unit in the distribution systems. This novel technology will be implemented and commissioned in low-income, disadvantaged, and Native American tribal communities located in High Fire-Threat District (HFTD) under California Electric Investor-Owned Utilities (IOU) service territories.
Sustainable Agriculture and Energy Systems for Rural Communities
Sustainable Agriculture and Energy Systems for Rural Communities
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a Tier-1 Rural Renewal Initiative grant to incorporate advanced energy technologies with agriculture to make agriculture more sustainable as an activity, reduce the agricultural production cost, and improve farmers’ profit.
Decline in the financial soundness of small-scale-farming is one of the main issues that farmers in rural counties are facing, which has led to the loss of family farms. One effective solution to increase farmers’ income and their ability to stay in agriculture is to improve productivity of farms. Farm productivity highly depends on the cost of energy. To this end, the incorporation of advanced energy technologies with agriculture can play an important role in reducing energy costs, increasing the net farm income, and promoting more sustainable farming. This project aims to study the integration of local alternative energy resources (AER) with agriculture in rural areas. Alternative energy and farming have the potential to be a winning combination. It not only contributes to energy cost reduction, energy efficiency, and farming productivity, but also provides farmers with a long-term source of income. On the power grid side, deployment of local AER addresses the capacity shortage and reliability of electricity supply to rural areas. However, one of the challenges in the integration of RES into agriculture is that AER, such as Photovoltaics (PV) and wind, are weather dependent and intermittent. Also, electrical load, associated with water irrigation and other cropping activities, is changing as a nonlinear function of time, which adds extra uncertainty into the problem. Due to the temporal scale differences in plant and AER energy production, the cost-effective coupling of AER and rural agriculture faces an important issue called “multi-time scale coupling".
This project tackles multi-time scale coupling by developing rigorous models of agricultural load and AER generation to determine an optimized strategy for spatiotemporal based, multi-time scale, multi-model coupling. The project will develop probabilistic models for agricultural load and AER energy generation via a joint effort by researchers, energy service providers, and farmers. Then by incorporating stochastic characteristics of load and generation into a system design, the team seeks to mitigate risk of multi-time scale coupling that will lead to cost effective operation of an agriculture-AER system. The proposed research is expected to result in a systematic design strategy for coupling of AER with rural agriculture to achieve a sustainable agricultural system.
AI-Enabled Proactive Resilience Enhancement of Electric Infrastructure Against Wildfire
AI-Enabled Proactive Resilience Enhancement of Electric Infrastructure Against Wildfire
Dr. Hamid Nazaripouya received a NSF EPSCOR grant to design and develop a proactive solution for enhancing grid resilience under wildfires in terms of active robustness and resourcefulness
In recent years, electric infrastructures have experienced significant damage and disruption due to large fires. The spread of wildfires into residential and/or commercial areas can also impact electricity distribution systems and substations. The Starbuck Fire burned half a million acres across Oklahoma and Kansas and caused at least $50 million in damages. The Thomas Fire led to widespread customer service disruptions and caused outages for more than 85,000 customers. According to the study performed by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the number and severity of future wildfires is expected to increase rapidly, exposing significant populations and infrastructure to wildfire losses and service disruptions.
I Although significant efforts have been made by utility companies to improve power grid resilience under wildfire, the focus has been mainly on passive resilience techniques such as undergrounding power lines, vegetation management, pole reinforcing and other system hardening methods. However, these passive methods, which are focused on replacement and hardening of electric infrastructure are extremely costly. For instance, the estimated cost to underground Oklahoma’s power lines is more than $58 billion. Fortunately, these costs can be minimized or delayed by incorporating smart control measures (i.e., active grid resilience) into the operational procedures of the system to effectively manage resources/assets, and survive a crisis as it happens. The focus of active grid resilience methods is to push the system to “bend” not to “break” against wildfire. They can be designed to minimize the immediate impact of wildfires, absorb and withstand the impacts, and quickly recover the system to its stable state.
This project aims to develop a decision-making tool to enhance the proactive resilience of electrical systems under wildfires considering real-time wildfire impact scenarios. During the course of a progressing wildfire, the proposed tool will help the power grid minimize the power interruption by proactively responding to wildfire contingencies via adaptation, load and resource management, and dynamic topology reconfiguration. The proactive grid response will be made based on identification of wildfire impacts caused by flame, heat, smoke, and ash on the electrical grid. Analytical modeling techniques will be utilized to generate and analyze possible impact scenarios of wildfire on the power grid leveraging artificial intelligence techniques. Then according to possible failure and contingency scenarios, a stochastic optimization will be developed and solved in real time to pursue network reconfiguration, and optimal operation of controllable assets in the grid under wildfire events.
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