Electric company executives recognize the risk wildfires pose to their assets, customers, and the communities they serve. Yet, starting from a position of strength and staying ahead of that evolving risk is a challenge. Executives are also seeing a shifting regulatory and legal landscape around wildfire liability and what electric companies are expected to have already in place to reduce asset-caused ignitions.
Risk management for other natural hazards like ice and snow often revolves around outage restoration and explainable models for revenue loss of customers awaiting power. Wildfire risk is different because electric companies must assess the combined probability of an event occurring – an asset-caused ignition – and what the consequences will be from that ignition. With this knowledge, you can explain your company’s actual risk to insurers and plan your mitigation to reduce that risk further. Just knowing your service area’s wildfire risk isn’t enough anymore.
Technosylva’s CEO Bryan Spear shared in Electric Perspectives Magazine the 3 ways executives can gain the advantage.
In summary, those are:
- Understanding the potential consequences of asset-ignited wildfires is crucial. Not all ignitions are created equal, so electric companies must prioritize assets for hardening based on their likelihood of causing severe damage, not just the risk around them.
- Taking the probability of ignition into account when assessing an electric company’s wildfire risk. Electric companies often assume that this probability is uniform across all assets, but in reality, it depends on a variety of ever-shifting factors, such as vegetation, weather, and landscape. Quantifying expected risk from assets can help prioritize mitigation efforts and vegetation management planning.
- Integrating advanced weather data asset outage analysis to gain a comprehensive view of overall wildfire risk. By combining the probability of failure with the probability of ignition, executives can determine the likelihood of a specific asset causing a wildfire. This helps forecasting possible ignitions and taking proactive measures to prevent them.
Learn how you can predict, mitigate, and prevent your evolving wildfire risk and additionally, how Technosylva solutions provide leading electric utilities with increased risk management, operations, asset mitigation, emergency planning, regulatory compliance, and improved public safety.
You can read the full article in Electric Perspectives Magazine here.
