You’re being told by regulators, investors, and insurers that you must develop a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) program. You’re being told to institute detailed plans to mitigate your wildfire risk. All the while, you’re thinking, we don’t have wildfire risk! Then, one summer afternoon, you receive news that the National Weather Service has issued a red flag warning and high wind warning for your entire service area. Of course, your service area has seen “red flag warnings” before, but reports from the National Weather Service call for the possibility of a historic event. They call for extreme wind and extreme fire danger, the likes of which rarely occur, or have never occurred. The media takes notice and presses the common new theme of impending danger. As you assess your risk, you face an influx of weather data that you are trying to piecemeal together along with asset consideration to provide an operational picture for the next 24-72 hours spanning your entire service area across thousands of miles of overhead power lines.
In this scenario, you’re an engineer or a risk manager. The electric utility does not have a meteorologist or a robust emergency operations team in a high-tech emergency operations center. Now, your electric utility leadership is looking at you to answer where and with what actions the utility should take to keep its wires from starting fires. If you think you’re stressed now reading this, wait until you’re in that situation where you have an extreme fire danger event over large parts of your service territory and now must provide a list of circuits that qualify for possible PSPS over miles of lines with appropriate guidance for action. It is not a fun place to be, and I can say from my years of experience working in emergency operations centers facing those threats that the more guesswork you can take out of your decision-making, the better off you will be.
As a meteorologist, I often say that the first action your electric utility should take is to hire a meteorologist, or two or five, specifically with fire weather experience to help bridge your understanding of weather conditions and the variables of wildfire behavior. This may be difficult for a smaller utility as a first step in its journey toward wildfire risk reduction. Yet, an electric utility needs to strengthen its understanding of wildfire weather conditions to have even a fighting chance of mitigating the potential consequences of that 1-in-100 year event.
So, how can technology help take the guesswork out of wildfire risk reduction? The answer is all in the modeling. People can rightly feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of data that is required and where to start. If an electric utility relies solely on publicly available fire weather data like wind, temperatures, and relative humidity, to assess their short-term risk, they will miss valuable factors that better explain the consequence from asset-caused ignitions and areas of risk within service territories. Here, more granular risk modeling is required that considers factors like vegetation conditions, topography, and the outage/ignition potential of specific assets. The scope of “red flag warnings” are often far larger than what an electric utility needs to identify specific risks on their system to specific communities.
Context is another important factor as part of that modeling. What you really need to know are the impacts. Not all 40 mph winds will have the same level of risk or impact. In some places, like notoriously windy Wyoming, that’s called “Tuesday.” In other places, a 40 mph wind can cause havoc on a system’s performance and reliability. You need technology that helps you contextualize the risk in your models and define the required steps to reduce an asset-caused ignition. You also need to know where your risk truly is over your service territory, based on long-term historic weather modeling laid against your asset conditions, since the consequence of wildfire is not just contained to your presumed “high-risk” areas.
While wildfires may seem like a distant threat, proactive measures are crucial for electric utilities everywhere. Investing in fire weather expertise and advanced risk modeling can transform overwhelming data into actionable insights. By taking the guesswork out of wildfire risk reduction, electric utilities can make informed decisions at the right moment to mitigate wildfire dangers and protect their communities. Learn more about the modeling science behind this work and how that science is put into practice.
