The Effect of Blocking Automatic Reclosing on Wildfire Risk and Outage Times

In recent years, several catastrophic wildfires in North America have been attributed to electrical faults. As a result, there is now a spotlight on the role of electrical grids in these natural disasters. Attempts to mitigate the effects of power grid faults in drought regions include major changes to grid operational procedures, such as the removal of automatic reclosing. This paper examines the operational ramifications of these changes. A study is performed to analyze over a decade of outage data examining the impact of automatic reclosing on normal power grid operation and performance. We conclude that for a majority of faults, the initial reclosing attempt is successful. This implies that many power system faults could be cleared by one reclose attempt without incurring significant additional fire ignition risk. However, if the initial reclose attempt is unsuccessful, subsequent reclose attempts appear to have lower probability of success and could be avoided without significantly impacting reliability.