Overview
Xcel Energy uses Technosylva to advance their wildfire risk spread modeling capabilities, enabling them to estimate potential wildfire spread scenarios and impacts to customers and assets. Technosylva’s platform is helping Xcel to develop and define the criteria to inform operational and physical wildfire mitigation programs.
Paul McGregor
Xcel Energy
Vice President, Wildfire Risk Management
”I worked in wildfire risk assessment and mitigation for several years in California, becoming a seasoned partner with Technosylva at multiple California utilities. When I arrived at Xcel Energy, and I was tasked with continuing to build wildfire mitigation programs across a multi-state jurisdiction, I was pleased that Xcel had partnered with Technosylva to build its initial toolset, and expanding these capabilities across the expanded service territory was the natural choice to deliver quality analysis and modeling in an accelerated time frame.
In the face of more frequent extreme weather events, these tools equip us with the situational awareness to make informed decisions in both our grid operations and our system hardening investments to mitigate against ignitions associated with our electrical facilities in the least disruptive manner for our customers.
Modeling Wildfire Consequence
Fire Spread Modeling
Xcel recently implemented wildfire risk spread modeling software and is using it to further refine and identify the key areas to focus wildfire mitigation efforts.
The implementation of Technosylva’s industry-leading wildfire spread modeling software enabled the Xcel to generate millions of simulations to estimate potential wildfire spread scenarios under varying fire weather conditions. These simulations also estimated the potential consequences of an ignition for specific assets.
Situational Awareness
Xcel also uses Technosylva to improve situational awareness through the integration of various sources of wildfire notifications from IRWIN and FireGuard.
FireGuard utilizes advanced satellite technology to detect and then send alerts of probable fire activity based on sensing areas of increased heat.
