ARIZONA - Engineers from Arizona State University are developing The Wildfire Awareness and Risk Management (WARM) system - a new electric power infrastructure monitoring system to protect the energy infrastructure from wildfires.

According to a recent report from the United Nations, the global incidence of extreme fires is projected to increase by 50% by the end of the century. The total area impacted by wildfires in the United States has expanded by an average of almost 200,000 acres each year for the past three decades.

The Wildfire Awareness and Risk Management (WARM) system will utilize the Internet of Things wireless sensors to monitor the environment around power transmission equipment in the most remote settings, take that data and use it to push more resilient grid operations during times of high wildfire risks, reports Daily Energy Insider. Power lines and other grid equipment often stretch for miles of remote wilderness that can fire susceptible and hard to help due to the isolation.

“The relationship between wildfires and the power grid is complex,” Anamitra Pal, ASU assistant professor of electrical engineering and leader of its WARM research, said. “Where exactly is a fire relative to power lines in some distant area? How much of a particular line’s capacity is reduced due to that fire? What’s the best time to take a line out of service? Right now, there are fundamental gaps in the sensing capabilities and in the decision-making methods needed to answer these questions.”

The National Science Foundation agreed, supplementing Pal’s efforts with a $1.5 million award from its Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams (ASCENT) program. This investment and more is being used by the WARM project team to raise real-time situational awareness and create better strategies and means of fire prevention and rapid response by utility operators, municipal managers, and state regulators.

Primarily, this will take four forms: remote sensing, wireless communication, power system security analysis, and optimization. Self-sustaining sensors will be critical for distant areas, according to Pal. It will also take some consideration of capacity.

“Making these devices self-sustaining means harvesting energy from solar cells or coupling from power lines,” said Jennifer Blain Christen, another ASU associate professor of electric engineering and a co-principal investigator for the devices. “But those capacities are not very generous, so we still need to be conservative with energy consumption. Our idea is to implement an innovative, hierarchical sensor system. It will divide the various sensors of each unit into several levels according to their power consumption.”

The team will pursue preventative and corrective decision-making at the operations level to lower overall wildfire risk from the grid, inform decision-making for fires sparked by sources beyond the grid, and guide policymaking with more preemptive, future-focused decisions.

Source: Daily Energy Insider