Arash Farokhi Soofi

Muhammad Waseem, Arash F. Soofi, Saeed D. Manshadi

Wildfires and other extreme weather conditions due to climate change are stressing the aging electrical infrastructure. Power utilities have implemented public safety power shutoffs as a method to mitigate the risk of wildfire by proactively de-energizing some power lines, which leaves customers without power. System operators have to make a compromise between de-energizing of power lines to avoid the wildfire risk and energizing those lines to serve the demand. In this work, with a quantified wildfire ignition risk of each line, a resilient operation problem is presented in power systems with a high penetration level of renewable generation resources. A two-stage robust optimization problem is formulated and solved using column-and-constraint generation algorithm to find improved balance between the de-energization of power lines and the customers served. Different penetration levels of renewable generation to mitigate the impact of extreme fire hazard situations on the energization of customers is assessed. The validity of the presented robust optimization algorithm is demonstrated on various test cases.

Nika Nizharadze, Arash Farokhi Soofi, Saeed D. Manshadi

In this paper, statistical machine learning algorithms, as well as deep neural networks, are used to predict the values of the price gap between day-ahead and real-time electricity markets. Several exogenous features are collected and impacts of these features are examined to capture the best relations between the features and the target variable. Ensemble learning algorithm namely the Random Forest issued to calculate the probability distribution of the predicted electricity prices for day-ahead and real-time markets. Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) is utilized to capture long term dependencies in predicting direct gap values between mentioned markets and the benefits of directly predicting the gap price rather than subtracting the predictions of day-ahead and real-time markets are illustrated. Case studies are implemented on the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) electricity market data for a two years period. The proposed methods are evaluated and neural networks showed promising results in predicting the exact values of the gap.