Enhancing Grid Resiliency in High Fire or Flood Risk Areas: Integrating Protective Relay Settings, Broken Conductor Detection, and Grid Hardening for Climate-Induced Event Preparedness

The issue of extreme weather events has become a significant concern for transmission and distribution protection systems, leading to increased scrutiny of traditional protective relay settings and electrical infrastructure designs. While many utilities and system operators are adopting localized grid enhancements to strengthen their electrical networks, the lack of comprehensive documentation of these approaches in the current literature poses a challenge. As consulting engineers for large electrical utilities, the authors have summarized their experience with recent weather-induced grid enhancement techniques that are being adopted in response to climate-induced events. The increasing threat of extreme weather events, including floods and wildfires, highlights the importance of adopting resiliency metrics that can gauge system resilience under various extreme weather conditions. The paper presents one such metric and explores innovative approaches for dynamically adjusting protection measures to prevent wildfire ignition and addressing the need for security against operational errors in load delivery. The manuscript also delves into advancements in relay settings tailored to high-fire threats and provides a blueprint of the progress in energy reduction techniques during electrical faults to mitigate ignition risks via ground fault neutralizers and midair broke conductor detection capabilities. As traditional design may not be ideal under extreme weather threats, this paper also considers structural resilience and flood impact mitigation strategies for stations near floodplains. By combining a host of grid resiliency design techniques and analysis tools, as discussed here, tomorrow's electrical infrastructure will be better prepared to meet these climate induced challenges.