Large wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe in the United States and other regions. This trend, driven by complex interactions among climate conditions, fuel availability, and human activities, could impact future wildfire activity. Besides being a significant threat to physical assets and public safety, wildfires threaten energy companies’ ability to provide reliable and affordable electric service.
As energy companies deploy the grid of the future, power companies face increasing pressure to better understand wildfire-related risk, address threats to electric infrastructure, and develop mitigation strategies. To support these efforts, EPRI’s Climate READi (Climate REsilience and ADaptation initiative) team recently released a report and interactive tool to proactively assist energy providers.
The report groups wildfire risk products by primary purpose and evaluates available tools for historical analysis, current risk screening, operational decision support, climate change-informed planning, and physics-based wildfire modeling. The report helps power companies understand future wildfire risk, but also the historic and current risk, which can in turn help identify appropriate tools for both present-day and long-term planning.
In the report, four wildfire risk components are defined following the approach used by the U.S. Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk to Communities: likelihood, intensity, exposure, and vulnerability. Of the 36 products evaluated to estimate wildfire risk, the analysis found very few that included all four risk dimensions.
The paper found that most existing projections evaluate future changes in fire weather only, which is challenging to link to future wildfire probability. This highlights the importance of developing comprehensive risk assessment products that identify the potential for wildfires under a wide range of physical and socioeconomic drivers – while also accounting for the severity of impact and the resilience of communities that may be affected.
Researchers noted the benefit of combining exposure and vulnerability assessments to more broadly define the potential consequences of wildfires. Vulnerability includes the physical susceptibility to damage and the capacity of communities and ecosystems to recover after a disaster. Often, electric system vulnerability requires company and asset-specific information that may need to be assessed contextually for each power company. With the complex challenges wildfires create for the electric power sector, this research can help electric companies determine the optimal products for their specific applications.
Additionally, the study highlights the importance of holistic approaches to wildfire assessment that cover all physical drivers of wildfires to better identify potential impacts. This approach requires a more dynamic understanding of climate-wildfire-vegetation interactions and future human activity than what climate models can currently incorporate. To address these limitations, scientists may use physics-based wildfire simulation models to estimate wildfire activity under different climate scenarios, fuel loads, and ignition patterns.
In addition to wildfire burn risk, the study also considered 13 wildfire smoke assessment products that estimate air quality outcomes from these events. Researchers evaluated datasets that can be downloaded for analysis, models that can be used to simulate the smoke, and tools that provide a web-based platform for analysis. They identified a gap in isolating wildfire smoke concentrations from other air quality issues, such as vehicle and industrial emissions. Building a foundational understanding of historical trends and patterns in wildfire smoke can improve our understanding of current and future smoke risks.
While not exhaustive, the research can help energy companies make more informed decisions regarding the possible adoption and implementation of these products. In addition, organizations are encouraged to submit products for review, and updates will be made to the web version of this report on an ongoing basis.
This report is accompanied by an online interactive webpage, including a filtering tool that can be used to identify the most useful products for an electric company’s specific needs and geographical contexts. By understanding the strengths and limitations of each product, power companies can tailor wildfire risk assessments and decisions around strategies to mitigate damage to infrastructure, reduce impact to customers, and help build community resilience.
A link to the report is available here: Evaluation of Wildfire Risk Assessment and Wildfire Smoke Datasets, Models, Tools, and Services (epri.com)
