The Wildfire Risk Evaluation of the System Tool (WREST)—developed by PNNL—is a performance-based, geospatial framework that quantifies wildfire threats to electrical infrastructure by translating weather-driven and preemptive shutoff events into line outage probabilities and visually mapping at-risk grid segments.
Key features include:
- Probabilistic modeling of transmission-line outages due to extreme weather and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), delivering cumulative outage probabilities at fine spatial resolution
- Interactive geography-aware dashboard—overlays outage risks on a 50 km grid across the WECC region, enabling filtering by probability thresholds and exploration of socioeconomic and biophysical context
- Integrated contingency evaluation—connects with Python and PowerWorld tools to evaluate system impacts and inform mitigation strategies via real-world scenario analysis
WREST empowers grid operators and planners with predictive insights to prioritize wildfire resilience investments by visualizing where and how wildfire-related outages are most likely to occur—and what they might cascade into.
List of publications, media or references:
- Chalishazar V. H., et al., 2023. "Wildfire Risk Evaluation Framework for Grid Operations and Planning," 2023 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM), Orlando, FL, USA, , pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/PESGM52003.2023.10252841.
- Datta S., et al., 2024. "Enhancing Grid Resilience during Wildfires in Socioeconomic Vulnerable Regions using Powered and Non-Powered Hydro Dams," 2024 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM), Seattle, WA, USA, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/PESGM51994.2024.10688862.