“The technical planning was solid, the legal framework was clear, but sitting in that boardroom, she realized the hardest challenge wasn’t operational: it was cultural.“
The regulator’s question cut straight to the heart of the matter: “So you’re asking us to approve a multimillion-dollar program designed to turn off our customers’ power? How exactly do we explain that to our stakeholders?” The CEO of ElectriCo knew the follow-up questions were coming: What about the customer complaints? How do we handle the public backlash when people lose power during heat waves?
The CEO had anticipated this moment. For months, her team had been developing their Public Safety Power Shutoff program, driven by regulatory pressure and mounting wildfire liability. But although the fire safety logic was sound, PSPS events also brought negative customer response: angry residents, frustrated businesses, and heated community meetings. The technical planning was solid, the legal framework was clear, but sitting in that boardroom, she realized the hardest challenge wasn’t operational: it was cultural.
At the same time, her veteran operations supervisor was grappling with the same challenge from a different angle. After 25 years of perfecting one skill above all others (getting the lights back on as fast as possible), he was now being asked to lead the new “proactive outage team.” Outage duration had been his scorecard, system reliability his measure of success. The irony wasn’t lost on him.
“Help me understand this,” he told his manager during their planning session. “We’re building teams to deliberately cause outages, and we’re calling this progress?”
For electric utility leaders facing growing wildfire threats, these parallel conversations in boardrooms and operations centers capture the essential challenge: transforming an organization built on reliable power delivery into one that embraces proactive power removal for community safety.
When Split-Second Decisions Meet Century-Old Culture
The first reality electric utilities face is that wildfire response operates on an entirely different timeline than traditional utility operations. When meteorological conditions shift rapidly, teams have 48 to 72 hours to analyze vast service territories, assess thousands of assets, and notify potentially tens of thousands of customers.
This creates an immediate tension. Electric utilities must maintain their core operational excellence while building entirely new capabilities that operate under completely different rules. Start here: give your wildfire response teams clear decision-making authority and direct executive reporting lines, separate from traditional operations approval processes.
Beyond 50/50 Calls: Understanding Your Risk Appetite
Perhaps the most challenging cultural shift involves how electric utilities approach uncertainty. Traditional utility planning often seeks to eliminate uncertainty through comprehensive analysis and conservative safety margins. Wildfire response requires utilities to make consequential decisions based on probabilistic forecasts and incomplete information.
This forces a critical organizational conversation: what is your utility’s risk tolerance? A conservative approach might cast a wider net during PSPS events, potentially impacting more customers to ensure comprehensive safety coverage. A higher risk tolerance might focus more narrowly on high-confidence risk zones, trading some uncertainty for reduced customer impacts.
The essential first step: document your risk tolerance explicitly and train teams to apply it consistently under pressure.
Building the Teams That Make It Work
The operational reality of wildfire response demands teams that bridge meteorology, operations, customer communications, and emergency management. These teams must be available 24/7 during high-risk periods and capable of making consequential decisions in compressed timeframes.
For all utilities, staff training becomes critical, focusing on interpreting meteorological data, understanding the fundamentals of fire behavior, and executing protocols under pressure. Most importantly: identify the specific wildfire expertise your teams lack, then find external partners who can provide not just technology, but cultural wisdom from utilities who’ve already made this transition. Executive engagement proves essential, signaling that this represents a fundamental evolution in how the utility serves its communities.
The Path Forward
The electric utilities successfully navigating this transition share common characteristics: they’ve built specialized teams with clear decision-making authority, invested in comprehensive staff training, and secured executive leadership that champions proactive risk management.
The cultural shift isn’t just about accepting PSPS or other necessary tools. It’s about building organizations capable of protecting communities through decisive action, even when that action challenges traditional utility instincts. For electric utilities still building this culture, the communities you serve are counting on your ability to evolve quickly and completely.
