Hugo Budd '24 Civil Engineering
Undergraduate Fellow
Western Area Power Administration (WAPA)
Through the Shultz Fellowship, I am working with the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA). Part of the Department of Energy, WAPA markets wholesale power from federally owned multi-use hydroelectric facilities throughout the Western United States. With over 17,000 circuit-miles of transmission capacity, they own and operate a significant fraction of the long-distance transmission capacity in the region. WAPA has long term contracts with preference customers, such as municipalities, national labs, tribes, and cooperatives, as well as selling wholesale hydropower on the open market.
I have been working very closely with WAPA’s Project and Asset services team on two projects, both of which have allowed me to broaden and enhance my skills and knowledge of the bulk electric system.
As a Western utility, WAPA has been evaluating its vegetation management program to reduce wildfire risk and hazard. Vegetation management is a very complex issue with many stakeholders involved, and so presents unique challenges to the industry. Before working at WAPA I had spent time on conservation crews and as a wildland firefighter for the United States Forest Service, so I enjoyed being able to leverage my previous professional experience and knowledge to problems facing transmission operators. WAPA asked me to benchmark their vegetation management program against their industry peers, including Investor and Municipally-Owned Utilities, Cooperatives, and another Power Marketing Administration. I spent the next couple weeks reading Wildfire Mitigation Plans and investigating how utilities were leveraging advanced technology, such as LiDAR imaging and machine learning models to enhance their vegetation data collection, to various degrees of success. I compiled a report, highlighting how WAPA’s data collection, inspection regime, resource stewardship, and technological implementation compares to its peers. I found this a very interesting problem, as vegetation management has become incredibly relevant and contentious in my home of California. My previous land management experience has been solely “boots on the ground” so the office-based approach was an adjustment but very interesting!
WAPA also asked me to look at incorporating climate change data into their asset management system. I spent some time reading papers, figuring out ways I could leverage my skills and address one aspect of this very complex problem. Using my experience with climate data and GIS I proposed a project examining the impact of ambient temperature increases on electrical infrastructure, specifically thermally-limited components such as transmission line conductors, transformers, and other system equipment. Transmission line ratings are carefully determined by conductor sag due to thermal expansion or some other piece of equipment (e.g. transformer, circuit breaker, substation bus bar) exceeding its operating temperature for too long. Unfortunately, as the climate warms, these ratings, impacted by ambient air temperature, will decrease. I modeled all of WAPA’s transmission system conductors, referenced them against a few composite climate warming predictions, and calculated the capacity loss by 2045 and 2060. These data can then be incorporated into a power flow model to identify component overloads, congestion conditions, and any dangers of outages.
The greatest difficulty with this project was data collection. Getting the conductor gauges and models required sorting through many spreadsheets, databases, system diagrams, and engineering drawings, none of which were complete. I really enjoyed working with spatial data in ArcGIS and learning about the rating methodology for electrical infrastructure. I went into Civil Engineering and the energy field to address climate change, so this is very rewarding work for me! I have really resonated with WAPA’s mission to provide essential services reliably.
I am very thankful to the Shultz Fellowship and WAPA for providing me this opportunity. Moving forward, I am preparing a presentation for next week summarizing my findings. I also hope to reference this climate data with WAPA’s substation facilities to quantify impacts on other equipment. Hopefully, this project can play a small part in ensuring the electric system remains resilient in the face of a rapidly changing climate.
