Working closely with California and other western state utilities, Technosylva has developed and successfully deployed a suite of wildfire risk analysis products that are specifically tailored to meet electric utility needs. These products provide robust and proven solutions to address wildfire-based liability and regulatory requirements.
Risk Management
Recent tragic wildfires remind us that the “unprecedented” is now a reality electric utilities must address in their risk planning. As wildfire threatens new communities and landscapes, electric utilities – many facing this threat for the first time – must improve their decision-making capabilities and have the best available data to mitigate their risk. With this knowledge, electric utilities can employ more effective asset-hardening, more impactful vegetation management plans, and more surgical de-energization decisions.
So, how can electric utilities gain the edge they need?
Understanding Consequence of Risk
Simply identifying the probability of a wildfire does not explain what the possible consequences are – including possible liability – from an asset-caused ignition.
Typically, a lot of energy company risk managers focus on ignition modeling, but it’s important to differentiate that ignition is not risk. Risk is the possibility of damage, loss, and/or harm occurring from an ignition. Understanding which potential fires would be the most destructive is critical. Understanding the consequence of ignition allows electric utilities to properly prioritize mitigation efforts and daily operations, including de-energization and PSPS decision making to reduce their wildfire risk.
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Identifying Risk Spend Efficiencies (RSE)
Risk managers need to know which assets pose catastrophic risks if they fail. By quantifying the risk, they can properly prioritize mitigation efforts. Risk Spend Efficiency (RSE) cuts through the noise, by precisely identifying where investments deliver the biggest risk reduction return.
Advancing Situational Awareness
Our platform performs hundreds of millions of fire simulations daily to generate risk forecasts with risk metrics calculated every 1-3 hours, for service territories and critical assets. New forecasts are derived daily to provide accurate and timely analysis of possible wildfire events. This provides insights into current and future weather and fire danger scenarios to inform daily operations.
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An Executive Report
Understanding Electric Utility Wildfire Risk and Liability Exposure
Download this executive report to gain a better understanding of you risk exposure and mitigation best practices to reduce wildfire impact.
Operations
Energy companies are challenged with reducing wildfire risk and increasing reliability as part of their ongoing operations. Simply knowing the probability of ignitions does not explain what the possible consequences are, including possible liability, from an asset-caused ignition.
How can you understand your wildfire risk and know your company’s risk profile days in advance?
Forecasting Your Wildfire Risk
Our platform proactively forecasts risk associated with electric utility asset ignition sources over a 4-day horizon and provides you the information critical for operational decision-making: What are my riskiest assets and what assets do I consider for mitigation measures?
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On-Demand Wildfire Spread Modeling
Generate on-demand predictions of the spread and impacts of a wildfire in response to active incidents, or to support proactive planning through “what if” scenarios, days in advance.
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Situational Awareness
Our platform seamlessly integrates advanced fire spread prediction modeling with forecasted weather to determine where fires will spread from asset ignition sources, and quantifies the impacts associated with those ignitions. When combined with real-time data describing the active fire environment, this platform provides comprehensive situational awareness of wildfire risk across your entire service territory.
Informed PSPS Decision Making
View daily risk forecasts for individual distribution and transmission assets, identifying those with the greatest probability of causing significant impacts should a fire occur. Incorporate wildfire consequence outputs to determine which assets should be considered for Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) should extreme events warrant.
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On Demand Webinar
Your Guide to
Wildfire Risk
Watch this webinar that explores wildfire trends, risk exposure, mitigation, and real-time response strategies.
Assessing Mitigation Effectiveness
As part of the normal course of designing and maintaining an overhead electric system, electric utility engineers endeavor to regularly analyze circuits to plan hardening and rebuilding projects in order to reduce wildfire risk and increase reliability.
But, how do you effectively decide what mitigation measure, on which assets, will maximize your risk reduction?
Determining Asset Hardening
Our platform integrates historical fire weather scenarios with advanced wildfire spread modeling to calculate potential impacts for individual assets. When combined with asset failure and outage data, the probability of ignition can be integrated to derive an expected wildfire risk for each asset. This provides the information necessary to help prioritize asset-hardening decisions. This provides the basis for quantifying risk reduction and risk/spend efficiencies.
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Prioritizing Asset Inspections
Our platform assigns the results of hundreds of millions of fire spread predictions back to the asset ignition sources and provides you with detailed risk ratings for individual equipment and line segments. In addition, to supporting mitigation decisions, this information is ideal to help prioritize asset health inspections.
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Emergency Planning & Preparedness
Energy companies face challenges in operationalizing their wildfire risk. Do you have a clear picture of wildfire threats to your assets, or the risk to communities across your territory?
Can you effectively pre-position crews and equipment to respond to an evolving event?
Determining Resource Allocation & Positioning
Having up-to-date and accurate information on the active fire environment, forecasted conditions, and possible consequence, allows you to make more informed decisions on the allocation and positioning of resources, to mitigate possible equipment failure, or impacts to your infrastructure that may affect reliability.
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Providing Timely Communication
Having a consistent and accurate wildfire risk information platform enhances the ability to communicate risk across the company, to staff in the field, with partners and stakeholders, and to customers. Technosylva provides a platform for integrating multiple data sources into a single environment for sharing and communicating risk information on current or upcoming weather events.
Situational Awareness
Our platform seamlessly integrates advanced fire spread prediction modeling with forecasted weather to determine where fires will spread from asset ignition sources, and quantifies the impacts associated with those ignitions. When combined with real-time data describing the active fire environment, this platform provides comprehensive situational awareness of wildfire risk across your entire service territory.
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BLOG
Combating Wildfires with Better Technology
“Last year we had a 68% reduction in ignitions as a result of our layers of protection, resulting in a 99% reduction in acres burned in one of the very driest years that we had on record. Very tough conditions. So heading into this year, we know we have that technology armed and able to address whatever the conditions are.”
Patti PoppeCEO, PG&E
Hear from the CEO of PG&E, Patti Poppe, as she explains to Bloomberg News how technology is helping PG&E combat risk the of wildfire through advanced modeling, strengthened situational awareness, and improved decision making for asset hardening.
Regulatory Compliance & Reporting
Energy companies need the ability to integrate their own proprietary asset, weather, and risk data in a protected platform. They need to be able to show that their mitigation and hardening efforts meet or exceed regulatory requirements.
Increased regulatory and public scrutiny dictates the integration of advanced wildfire risk modeling to meet these obligations.
Meeting Regulatory Compliance
Whether for PSPS or WMP submittals, it is critical that you utilize the best information and tools possible to satisfy regulatory requirements. Our platform provides proven capabilities with accurate and battle-tested data that will endure the closest scrutiny from regulatory agencies and the public. By operationalizing the latest wildfire science and validating the data and tools daily with CAL FIRE, Technosylva offers a wildfire risk solution unparalleled in the industry. In fact, our technology is also readily used by Public Utility Commissions for their internal analysis.
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Ensuring Data Governance
Our solution architecture leverages the latest in cloud-based computing with client-side applications to minimize implementation timelines, complexity, and ensure a secure platform where proprietary data is protected and safe. With our ISO 27001 Cyber Security Certification, Technosylva understands the critical importance of keeping electric utility proprietary data secure and protected.
Improving Public Safety
Unfortunately, in recent years there have been destructive fires caused by electrical utility infrastructure failure and ignitions. This has resulted in the public demand for better operations and management to change the outcomes of these events.
Electric utility companies are challenged with meeting this obligation to improve public safety by reducing the risk from asset-caused wildfires, while maintaining a reliable and efficient system.
Communicating & Reducing Wildfire Risk
Technosylva’s solutions provide advanced modeling to quantify wildfire asset risk, providing the basis for mitigating that risk, and documenting achievements to the public. By integrating advanced scientific modeling, mitigation activities are more focused and effective for reducing risk from those assets with the greatest risk potential.
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