Enhancing Resilience of Modern Power Grids to Extreme Wildfire Events
Resilience of Modern Power Grids
With society’s increasing dependence on electricity to support essential services and daily activities (including transportation, commerce, communications, healthcare, water systems, and emergency response), the resilience of electric power infrastructure has become a critical national priority. Extreme weather events, climate-driven hazards, and human-triggered disruptions are increasingly challenging the ability of power systems to deliver reliable and secure electricity. Among these threats, wildfires have emerged as one of the most destructive and complex risks facing electric utilities, creating a two-way interaction in which power infrastructure can both be impacted by and contribute to wildfire ignition and propagation. In this talk, I will discuss how risk-informed planning and operational strategies can be developed and implemented to improve the survivability, adaptability, and resilience of electric power systems under high-impact, low-probability events. Particular attention will be given to the growing wildfire threat and the need for proactive, risk-informed decision-making frameworks that account for both grid reliability and public safety considerations. The presentation will highlight results and findings from our past and ongoing research projects at the GW Smart Grid Laboratory, where we investigate the interactions between wildfires and power systems through the development of advanced optimization, simulation, and decision-support tools.
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- Co-sponsored by Ali Razi-Kazemi
- Starts 08 August 2026 07:39 AM UTC
- Ends 28 September 2026 03:39 PM UTC
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Payman of GW's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Biography:
Senior Member, IEEE; received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 2009, the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, in 2011, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA, in 2017. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the George Washington University, Washington, DC in 2018, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests include electrical power systems reliability and resilience assessment, data-informed decision-making in energy systems, and smart electricity grid applications.
Dr. Dehghanian is the recipient of the 2014 and 2015 IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Professional Achievement Awards, the 2015 IEEE-HKN Outstanding Young Professional Award, the 2021 Early Career Award from the Washington Academy of Sciences, the 2022 George Washington University’s Early Career Researcher Award, the 2022 IEEE IAS Electric Safety Committee’s Young Professional Achievement Award, and the 2022 IEEE IAS Outstanding Young Member Service Award. In 2015 and 2016, Dr. Dehghanian was selected among the World’s Top 20 Young Scholars for Next Generation of Researchers in Electric Power Systems. He is currently a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing and IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications.
Email:
Address:SEH 6630, , Washington, United States, DC 20052