The electric utility sector including public power utilities are adopting a wide variety of strategies to mitigate against the threat that wildfires pose to utility infrastructure.
To assist public power utilities with wildfire mitigation efforts, the American Public Power Association recently launched a webpage that provides a variety of resources. The webpage includes a collection of resources to assist utilities in crafting their wildfire mitigation plans.
Many utilities used the fact that May was wildfire awareness month to highlight their wildfire mitigation efforts and boost awareness of wildfire risk.
BPA Releases Updated Wildfire Mitigation Plan
The Bonneville Power Administration recently released its updated wildfire mitigation plan, noting that all four Pacific Northwest states declared May as Wildfire Awareness Month.
Modifications to the 2024 plan include:
- Lessons learned since considering and implementing the Public Safety Power Shutoff procedure between 2021 and 2023, including improvements to customer communication as BPA considers implementing public safety power shutoffs.
- Evolving wildfire modeling and data integration in partnership with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that informs prioritization of vegetation management and maintenance work on transmission lines posing the greatest wildfire threat.
- Infusion of lessons learned applying the International Wildfire Risk Mitigation Consortium Maturity Model, which has helped BPA experts better understand current BPA programs and activities in relation to general utility threats. This has resulted in year-over-year improvements to BPA's plan and activities.
BPA is one of four power marketing administrations within the U.S. Department of Energy and its service territory covers Washington, Oregon, and small pieces of western Montana and western Wyoming.
WAPA Focuses on Risk Management, Mitigation
The Western Area Power Administration on May 23 said that members of WAPA “have worked this year to increase knowledge and awareness of wildfire risk and better understand potential wildfire impacts on WAPA’s infrastructure and transmission system.”
WAPA is also a DOE PMA and its service area encompasses a 15-state region of the central and western U.S. where its more than 17,000 circuit mile transmission system carries electricity from 57 hydropower plants operated by the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the International Boundary and Water Commission.
A recent post on WAPA’s website written by Stephen Collier notes that WAPA’s Enterprise Risk Management Program Manager Jason Mauch works with subject matter experts to identify and evaluate the greatest risks across the organization. One of those key risks for WAPA is wildfire.
“For me, it’s about understanding how risk around wildfires has changed and evolved,” he said in the post. “We’ve reviewed wildfire cases in numerous states, and it’s not just a forest issue anymore. Wildfires can happen in suburban areas as growth sprawls into fire-prone landscapes known as the Wildland-Urban interface.”
Austin Energy Utilizing AI Technology as Tool in Wildfire Mitigation Efforts
In a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast, Chris Vetromile, Wildfire Manager for Texas public power utility Austin Energy, details how Austin Energy is proactively working to mitigate the threat of wildfires including utilizing artificial intelligence technology.
He noted that the utility has partnered with Pano AI to deploy high definition cameras “that are put out in locations around Travis County and our service territory, the city of Austin, and they actually detect and look for smoke.”
The podcast episode and the transcript for the episode are available on APPA’s website.
Apple to Support SRP Resilient Water and Forest Initiative
In April, Arizona public power utility Salt River Project announced that Apple had joined as a partner supporting SRP’s Resilient Water and Forest Initiative, part of a continuing effort to ensure water resiliency.
The company will support the initiative’s restoration of nearly 30,000 acres of forests over the next 10 years, “helping strengthen a critical water supply for Central Arizona communities, including the Town of Payson and the Phoenix metropolitan area,” SRP said.
The project centers around the strategic thinning of forests located in northern Arizona that are at a high risk for severe wildfires. This includes forests around the C.C. Cragin Dam and Reservoir near Payson, Ariz., an area which supplies water to the C.C. Cragin Reservoir.
Apple’s support of the thinning project is expected to result in 1.8 billion gallons of water benefits over the next 20 years.
SRP noted that it is working with partners like Apple to provide funding that will allow state and federal agencies to strategically remove smaller trees.
This will enable larger, healthier trees to thrive and reduce the potential for catastrophic wildfires. Strategic forest thinning helps reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfires while protecting nearby communities, water infrastructure and water supplies, the utility said.
In May, SRP and Arizona State University announced that they have developed a new approach for estimating the water benefits of forest thinning treatments by creating a model that is being recognized as a leading-edge method for analyzing forest thinning’s impacts on water.
After a wildfire, rainfall washes ash and debris into rivers and reservoirs. The large amount of material that washes into SRP’s reservoirs reduces the system’s water storage capacity and can damage water infrastructure downstream such as dams and water treatment plants.
SRP and ASU piloted an effort in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona that determined forest thinning on about 3,400 acres would generate a benefit of approximately 230 acre-feet, or nearly 75 million gallons, of water during the first year.
Also, SRP and ASU are modeling projects in the East Verde River and East Clear Creek watersheds, which provide water to the Town of Payson and are areas at high risk for catastrophic wildfire. Results from that investigation in the Coconino National Forest are expected later this year.
Utilities Face Litigation Over Wildfires
A number of utilities in the U.S. have faced litigation in recent years tied to wildfires.
PacifiCorp, which is owned by famed investor Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy, has faced litigation tied to wildfires in the West.
In 2023, PacifiCorp reached a $299 million settlement agreement with 463 plaintiffs impacted by the 2020 Archie Creek fire in Douglas County, Oregon.
Also in 2023, the company reached a $250 million settlement agreement with 10 companies with commercial timber interests associated with the Archie Creek Complex Fire.
Additional details about litigation tied to this fire, as well as other fires, is available on the company’s website.
In his most recent letter to shareholders, Buffett wrote that it “will be many years until we know the final tally from BHE’s forest-fire losses and can intelligently make decisions about the desirability of future investments in vulnerable western states. It remains to be seen whether the regulatory environment will change elsewhere.”
He said that other electric utilities “may face survival problems resembling those of Pacific Gas and Electric and Hawaiian Electric. A confiscatory resolution of our present problems would obviously be a negative for BHE, but both that company and Berkshire itself are structured to survive negative surprises. We regularly get these in our insurance business, where our basic product is risk assumption, and they will occur elsewhere. Berkshire can sustain financial surprises but we will not knowingly throw good money after bad.”
In its most recent quarterly earnings report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 25, 2024, California investor-owned utility PG&E Corp. said that the financial impact of past wildfires is significant.
As of March 31, 2024, PG&E Corporation and PG&E had recorded aggregate liabilities of $1.125 billion, $400 million, $1.6 billion, and $100 million for claims in connection with the 2019 Kincade fire, the 2020 Zogg fire, the 2021 Dixie fire, and the 2022 Mosquito fire, respectively, and in each case before available insurance, and, in the case of the 2021 Dixie fire and the 2022 Mosquito fire, other probable cost recoveries.
“These liability amounts correspond to the lower end of the range of reasonably estimable probable losses, with the exception of amounts relating to the 2020 Zogg fire, which represent the best estimate of the liability, but do not include all categories of potential damages and losses,” it said.
P&E Corp. said that in response to the wildfire threat facing California, PG&E Corporation and PG&E “have taken aggressive steps to mitigate the threat of catastrophic wildfires.”
PG&E’s wildfire mitigation initiatives include Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings, public safety power shutoffs, vegetation management, asset inspections, and system hardening.
In particular, in 2023, PG&E introduced or expanded its use of several measures including downed conductor detection, partial voltage force outs, and transmission operational controls.
PG&E is also focused on undergrounding more lines each year while using economies of scale to make undergrounding more cost efficient. These initiatives have significantly reduced the number of CPUC-reportable ignitions and the number of acres burned, PG&E Corp. said.
In California, which has been hit by devastating wildfires in recent years, each electric utility in the state is required to submit a Wildfire Mitigation Plan in accordance with California Public Utilities Code Section 8387.
A recent white paper by researchers at Stanford’s Climate and Energy Policy Program said that different states’ laws hold utilities liable for wildfires in different ways; “therefore, the amount of potential wildfire risk exposure for a given utility may depend on the legal liability regime of the particular state in which it operates.”
In some states, utilities are held liable for wildfires only if the fire was ignited due to negligence on the utility’s part.
“In California, on the other hand, utilities are subject to strict liability for wildfire: this means that utilities are held legally responsible for fires ignited by their infrastructure, whether or not the fire was the result of negligence on the utility’s part. Further, under California’s “inverse condemnation” framework, utilities are required to compensate owners of property destroyed by utility-ignited fires for the value of the property destroyed,” it said.
Public Safety Power Shutoffs
A growing number of utilities in the U.S. are utilizing public safety power shutoffs as a proactive way in which to counter the threat of wildfires.
In April, investor-owned utility Xcel Energy said that for the first time in Colorado, it conducted a public safety power shutoff. More than 600 miles of lines were proactively de-energized.
With exceptionally high winds and the high risk of wind-driven wildfires in Colorado, Xcel Energy proactively shut off power to about 55,000 customers in Boulder, Gilpin, Larimer, Douglas, Broomfield and Jefferson Counties.
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission on April 10 announced a set of actions in response to the power outages over the weekend of April 6-7 and Xcel Energy’s deployment of the public safety power shutoff.
The Colorado PUC voted unanimously to open a formal investigatory process to document actions taken by Xcel during the storm, including customer notification and power restoration as well as to hear customers’ concerns.
“In initiating this process, the Commission will investigate what immediate and long-term regulatory actions might be needed for future prescribed outage events and deployment of alternative system operations intended to reduce the risk of wildfire,” it said.
The Commission said it would request detailed information from Xcel on the wind storm response and outages, including planning and communications, and seek input from impacted residents, local governments, businesses, and critical care providers.
In Washington State, Puget Sound Energy in 2024 is adding the tool of public safety power shutoffs to its toolbox of wildfire mitigation strategies.
Along with PG&E, other California IOUs – San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison -- have also utilized public safety power shutoffs.
Meanwhile, in Hawaii, Hawaiian Electric in late May said that it was launching a Public Safety Power Shutoff program. “Starting July 1, Hawaiian Electric may preemptively shut off power in areas that appear at high risk of wildfire during periods of forecast high winds and dry conditions to help reduce the risk of wildfires,” it said.
A PSPS will only be activated in an area if weather data, including statements from the National Weather Service, indicate conditions for heightened wildfire risk, the utility said.
“These conditions may include strong winds, low humidity and dry vegetation. Combined, these factors can result in downed trees or flying debris contacting power lines and damaging electrical infrastructure, which can create the risk of wildfires,” it said.
Before activating a PSPS, Hawaiian Electric will notify the public and coordinate with government officials, first responders and emergency response agencies. Hawaiian Electric will provide public notifications through news releases, social media, online outage maps and updates to its website. If weather conditions change suddenly, shutoff may occur with little or no notice, it said.
Looking ahead, Hawaiian Electric said it plans to continue to enhance and refine its PSPS program to make it more targeted and effective. These plans currently include implementing additional enhanced technology, weather forecasting targeting high-risk areas, customer education, plans for backup for critical customers, and community hubs and resources.
In early August 2023, wildfires swept across Maui’s Lahaina community. More than one hundred residents of the community died as a result of the wildfires.
On Aug. 24, 2023, the County of Maui filed a lawsuit against Maui Electric Company, Hawaiian Electric Company, Inc., Hawaiʻi Electric Light Company, Inc., and Hawaiian Electric Industries, Inc. for civil damages to the county’s public property and resources caused by recent Maui fires, including fires in Lahaina and in Kula.
Hawaiian Electric responded to the County of Maui lawsuit on Aug. 28 through a news release in which it outlined events that occurred on Aug. 8.
In the wake of wildfires on Maui, Hawaii, President Biden on Aug. 30, 2023, announced that the Department of Energy would provide $95 million through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to harden Hawaii’s electric grid, improve service, limit damage during future events, and help prevent failures in the future that could lead to severe events.
The recent white paper by researchers at Stanford Climate and Energy Policy Program said that PSPS “is an extremely effective tool to prevent utility wildfire ignitions when high fire-risk conditions make utility infrastructure unsafe to operate.”
Although implementation of PSPS “can be challenging, because PSPS events cause adverse effects for customers who lose power when the distribution lines connecting them to the electric grid are deenergized, utilities can limit these impacts by taking additional measures to minimize the scale, duration, and effects on customers caused by shutoffs,” the white paper said.
“When implemented successfully, these measures allow utilities to retain the benefits of PSPS for wildfire mitigation while reducing the disruption that PSPS events cause to retail customers, essential facilities like fire stations and hospitals, and infrastructure such as broadband networks and water suppliers,” it said.
Michigan Utility Unveils Wildfire Risk Mitigation Plan
On May 29, investor-owned Michigan energy company Consumers Energy announced its proposal to begin implementing a Reliability Roadmap.
The proposal, which the company said it would file with the Michigan Public Service Commission, includes more buried power lines, infrastructure upgrades and grid automation efforts to reduce the number and length of customer power outages.
Also included is a new wildfire risk mitigation plan, which the company said includes prioritized tree trimming, equipment upgrades in wildfire risk areas and more effective monitoring.
"Wildfire risk in Michigan has grown in recent years, due to changing weather patterns that result in longer than usual dry periods throughout the state,” said Greg Salisbury, vice president of electric distribution engineering. “Our new plan aims to provide more reliable service to our customers while strengthening and protecting the grid against destructive wildfire risk throughout Consumers Energy’s service territory.”
Federal Government Working to Address Wildfire Risks
The federal government is also taking steps to help with wildfire mitigation efforts across the U.S.
On May 14, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Xochitl Torres Small announced $250 million to help at-risk communities protect their homes, businesses and infrastructure from catastrophic wildfires.
The announcement through the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program will fund 158 projects to help communities in 31 states, two Territories and 11 Tribes develop community wildfire protection plans and remove overgrown vegetation that can fuel fires.
Now in its second year, the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program helps communities in the wildland-urban interface maintain resilient landscapes, create fire-adapted communities, and ensure safe, effective wildfire response.
Examples include nearly $10 million for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma to get the equipment they need to reduce wildfire risk through prescribed fire, thinning, and to educate and train firefighters and the communities they serve.
Wasco County in Oregon is receiving nearly $6 million to create fuel breaks and defensible space to protect Maupin, Pine Grove, Tygh Valley and other communities.
In Colorado, The Nature Conservancy will use nearly $9.9 million to protect communities in Archuleta County and watersheds that provide irrigation and drinking water to downstream users in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, which get 50% and 90% of their clean water from these watersheds, respectively.
In California, public power utility Trinity Public Utilities District will receive $9.5 million for a Right of Way Wildfire Mitigation Project.
The project will help reduce fuel buildup in high wildfire risk areas and minimize the probability that TPUD's infrastructure will become the origin of or a contributing source of a wildfire. The project will increase shaded fuel breaks, conduct hazard tree abatement and remove ladder fuels, resulting in reduced wildfire risk.
The public power community of Jacksonville, Fla., is receiving $250,000 to develop a community wildfire protection plan for the city.
Interest in the program has grown since its first year, with more projects being funded in more states and among more Tribes, thanks to an increase in applications, representing a nearly 20% increase in funding overall.
In total, the program is investing $1 billion over five years to assist at-risk communities through grants to local and Tribal communities, non-profit organizations, state forestry agencies, and Alaska Native Corporations, with planning for and mitigating wildfire risks on lands not managed by federal agencies.
The Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, will announce a third funding opportunity later this year.
DOE Funding for Wildfire Mitigation
In October 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy announced up to $3.46 billion for 58 projects across 44 states to strengthen electric grid resilience and reliability across the United States.
These projects will leverage more than $8 billion in federal and private investments as part of the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program. There are various strategies to protect the grid from wildfires, and many GRIP awardees will implement projects to build resiliency and safety into our electric system.
Approximately one quarter of all GRIP projects in this round of funding will implement wildfire mitigation strategies.
These efforts may include, but are not limited to, undergrounding vulnerable overhead lines and removing hazardous vegetation like trees before they become a problem; installing critical technology to protect the grid from high winds and fire, such as sensors, fire-resistant poles, and covered power lines; as well as improving modeling capabilities to better identify faults and risks in advance.
Washington public power utility Snohomish County PUD noted that month that it would be awarded $30 million to improve system reliability, mitigate wildfire risks, and enable demand management as part of GRIP program.
The PUD’s SnoSMART project is a $60 million infrastructure and software project that will deploy hundreds of wireless-connected smart grid devices to the PUD’s distribution grid and upgrade the software tools to operate them.
The SnoSMART project will revolutionize system visibility and control for PUD grid operators, further prepare the grid for transportation and building electrification, and enhance the utility’s ability to add distributed energy resources through advanced system planning, the PUD noted.
Upon completion, SnoSMART will reduce the energy burden for all PUD customers and help prevent wildfire smoke exposure throughout the region. The project will leverage existing partnerships with tribes, regulatory agencies, local governments, and labor to enhance community and grid resiliency and support safe, healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities.
This project will accomplish these objectives by:
- Replacing fire-causing expulsion fuses in highest risk areas
- Installing hundreds of wireless smart grid devices to improve grid reliability
- Upgrading aging software and technology systems to enable a more efficient grid
Meanwhile, on May 28, Snohomish County PUD noted that its crews will be busy this summer making electric system improvements and completing preventative maintenance projects.
Included among these efforts is targeted tree trimming. In an effort to protect infrastructure near wildfire-vulnerable areas, PUD tree trimming crews will be focusing efforts of tree, limb and brush removal this summer near primary conductors in the Darrington, Gold Bar and Index areas. This work will increase grid resiliency and reduce risk to our communities from the potential of wildfires, the PUD noted.
Other Washington State Public Power Utilities Also Addressing Threat of Wildfires
Seattle City Light, another public power utility in Washington State, is also proactively working to respond to the threat of wildfires to their electric infrastructure.
“The warmer and drier conditions driven by our changing climate are increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Even the traditionally wet forests of the Pacific Northwest are now at greater risk from wildfire than in the past, as are the buildings and infrastructure interlaced within the forests,” Seattle City Light notes on its website.
Seattle City Light “has been paying attention to these changing wildfire conditions. While the risk of fires being ignited by our own assets is low, we recognize that wildfire risk is increasing even in typically soggy areas of the state. In assessing these changing situations, we have proactively taken action to reduce the risk of starting wildfires and mitigate the potential impacts of wildfire on energy facilities, electricity delivery and the communities we serve.”
The public power utility has developed a wildfire risk reduction strategy.
The key elements of the strategy include the following:
- Risk assessment to understand the risk of electric grid assets causing wildfires, as well as the risk of those assets being affected by wildfires.
- Risk mitigation to reduce wildfire risk, including actions such as grid hardening and vegetation management.
- Emergency management to monitor for high-risk weather conditions when fires are more likely to occur and to respond when those conditions arise.
- Stakeholder engagement with the communities that may be affected by wildfire or City Light’s response to wildfires, and coordination with emergency response organizations and municipalities to respond to events.
- Governance and accountability to designate responsibility for execution of the WRRS and provide oversight to improve the strategy as it is executed.
Chelan PUD
In recent news, Washington State’s Chelan PUD on June 3 noted that its plan to prevent wildfire continues to evolve, including the county-wide expansion of a plan to proactively turn off power during extreme weather events.
For years, Chelan PUD has had a comprehensive wildfire plan intended to prevent wildfire and build a more fire-resilient electrical grid, it noted.
The plan includes:
- Vegetation management: Clearing hazard trees and shrubs away from powerlines
- Fire hardening: Converting transmission structures to steel and fire protection around wood poles
- Settings: Equipment upgrades and powerline setting changes in the highest fire risk areas to reduce the risk of ignition during fire season
Several of these measures are place-based, guided by fire risk assessments commissioned by Chelan PUD for its distribution and transmission lines.
In 2021, Chelan PUD developed one of Washington State’s first public safety power shutoff plans in a pilot area of about 3,000 customers in the Lake Wenatchee/Plain area.
“Chelan PUD calls it fire safety outage management. It’s a measure of last resort, and rarely used,” it said.
Starting this fire season, the utility announced the expansion of fire safety outage management to fire-prone areas county wide.
“It’s prudent that we put a robust wildfire mitigation plan in place to protect our communities from weather events, forest conditions and legal risks,” General Manager Kirk Hudson said.
Throughout the summer, the PUD will monitor the weather forecasts, including predicted wind gusts, humidity, fuel moisture and potential fire behavior. The conditions that trigger a fire safety outage are generally more severe than a red flag warning.
If a fire safety outage is forecasted to be necessary, the utility will attempt to notify customer-owners as soon as possible, ideally 48 hours in advance via email, recorded phone messages, the media, chelanpud.org, and through partners such as Chelan County Emergency Management.
The outage may last up to 24 hours or more, depending on the area crews need to inspect, and the amount of repair required to safely restore power.
To date, Chelan PUD has not yet had to implement a fire safety outage, but is prepared to do so, it said.
