Assessing the threat of wildfire to National Grid
We have developed a new way to assess wildfire threats to critical infrastructure and increase the resilience of National Grid's electricity transmission networks.
A growing pattern of extreme weather conditions
The UK is experiencing record numbers of wildfires. As events such as these are expected to increase in the coming decades, there is significant risk to critical infrastructure.
Recent events have highlighted the growing threat wildfires pose to energy infrastructure. Wildfires can affect the electricity grid in a variety of ways, including interruption of lines due to flame, smoke, and fire suppression efforts.
Photo credit: Andy Elliott
The 2020 Wareham Forest Fire caused a supply outage and system constraint. Even in areas where the fire may not have directly caused equipment to fail, operators may proactively deenergise equipment to avoid fire damage from weakening the grid and subsequent hazards. Smoke can greatly reduce solar photovoltaic generation capacity, placing further stress on the grid.
In 2021, the severity of recent events prompted National Grid Electricity Transmission (National Grid) to add ‘wildfire’ to their climate change adaptation reporting.
The increased threat of – and focus on – wildfire comes at a time when National Grid is expected to build over five times more transmission infrastructure (overhead or underground lines) than previous 30 years combined, increasing its capacity and moving towards a more sustainable electricity grid. With large-scale expansion on the horizon, a better understanding of the risk to critical infrastructure will help to strengthen resilience.
Thanks to EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account funding, Dr Daniel Donaldson, Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, led a project with Douglas Dodds (National Grid) and John Dora (Infrastructure Operators’ Adaptation Forum (IOAF)/Climate Sense) to quantify the threat wildfires pose to electricity transmission infrastructure in England and Wales.
Unlike earlier qualitative approaches, this project set about building a quantitative process for threat assessment.
Photo credit: Andy Elliott
Other important collaborators on the project with Dr Daniel Donaldson, included Dr Joseph Preece, Dr Kerryn Little, Professor Nick Kettridge, and Dr Emma Ferranti, from the University of Birmingham.
The works undertaken have been crucial in developing a full understanding of National Grid Electricity Transmission exposure to wildfire risks. This work has provided a crucial baseline of wildfire risk exposure.
Enhancing infrastructure resilience
The project’s origin can be traced back to a collaborative exchange session organised by National Grid at the Utility Week Live Conference in May 2023. Following this initial conversation, Dr Donaldson co-created this project with an immediate goal of providing a novel pathway to quantify wildfire threat to electricity infrastructure and guide evidence-based policy and grid design for National Grid.
Photo credit: Dr Kerryn Little
This involved:
- Mapping historical wildfires to the transmission infrastructure and identifying transmission circuits with the most fires in the nearby vicinity.
- Simulating fire behaviour for a range of fuel models representing UK land cover characteristics (informed by local factors including wind speed, and fuel data collected during the heatwave of July 2022 as part of the NERC-funded UK Fire Danger Rating System (UKFDRS) project).
- Developing a reproducible process that can quantitatively map wildfire behaviour to existing and future infrastructure.
Sharing key insights
National Grid gained key insights into the threat wildfires pose to their transmission infrastructure, with a presentation to US and UK employees, including the Group Vice President of Business Resilience & Crisis Management and others from National Grid Electricity Transmission and National Grid Electricity Distribution teams in early 2024. The project team then summarised the findings, quantitative asset exposure and recommendations in a policy briefing note.
Crucially, the team shared the code used for analysis with the National Grid Electricity Distribution’s data science team so it can support further wildfire assessments.
Photo credit: Andy Elliott
The project's work with National Grid was referenced in National Grid’s RIIO-T3 Climate Resilience Strategy annex 02. And the team's subsequent project with Network Rail was referenced in Network Rail’s Fourth Adaptation Report (ARP4).
Global recognition and relevance
The project and its findings are relevant beyond the National Grid. The team have presented research findings at the Supergen Energy Networks (SEN) Risk and Resilience Day in Newcastle, the NERC-funded UKFDRS, and the Infrastructure Operators Adaptation Forum (IOAF) – an Environment Agency network that brings together over 60 senior infrastructure professionals, the UK Climate Change Committee, and the UK Met Office, with local and national government. This network meeting sparked a new funded project to do similar analysis for Network Rail on their infrastructure.
The global relevance is clear too. Several research institutions based in California, where there is well-documented challenges with wildfires, invited the project team to present, including the University of California Riverside and the IEEE Power and Energy Society Foothill Section, and the University of California Los Angeles B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences.
The research has provided a foundation for electrical utilities to proactively adapt their transmission infrastructure and enhance the resilience of critical national infrastructure to wildfires, with all the indications that the relevance and open code will ensure the project’s impact informs other critical infrastructure affected by extreme climate conditions such as wildfires. Aside from continuing to share findings with the other utility companies and exploring new opportunities to scale findings across different infrastructure sectors, the team are publishing the methodology and technical details in academic publications.