Line Roald, an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and ECE graduate student Noah Rhodes recently received the PowerTech 2023 Best Student Paper Award.
IEEE PowerTech 2023 conference is the anchor conference of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) and is an opportunity for members in academia and industry to meet and share their research works.
The paper, titled “Co-optimization of power line de-energization and restoration under high wildfire ignition risk” proposes a mathematical optimization problem to help utilities decide where and when to implement wildfire preemptive power shutoffs, as well as how to most efficiently restore power once the wildfire risk is lower. The paper includes a co-optimization for the shutoffs of power lines to reduce wildfire ignition risk as well as the restoration of these power lines to bring power back online. The full duration of the power outages is accounted for to reduce the incentive to turn off the grid.
