Duration: 1 hour

This informative webinar, in collaboration with Utility Dive, explores the tactics utilized by leading electric utilities to forecast, mitigate, and respond to wildfire risks and the associated liability.

As wildfires continue to increase in frequency and severity, they present a significant threat to electric utilities infrastructure and communities. Electric utilities face a risk stemming from their infrastructure to trigger wildfires and the liabilities that come with that.

Electric utilities can adopt proactive measures, such as preemptive power shutdowns to minimize the risk of wildfires and safeguard the areas in their service territory as well as using solutions that can help assess assets for mitigation purposes.

During the session, you will learn from Technosylva:

• Insights into the latest trends and patterns in wildfire behavior, and their implications for risk and liability exposure
• Methodologies for assessing wildfire risk and strategies for implementing effective mitigation measures
• Tools and techniques for real-time monitoring and response to wildfire threats

Speakers

Why Electric Utilities Must Move Beyond Forecasts to Climatological Foresight

Electric utilities today face a growing and unpredictable threat: the Black Swan event — a rare but devastating natural catastrophe that can cripple infrastructure and disrupt entire communities. As wildfires and extreme weather events become more frequent and intense, relying solely on traditional weather forecasts is no longer enough.

In a recent Utility Dive piece, Steve Vanderburg, Technosylva’s Vice President for Weather & Risk Solutions, explored how electric utilities can better anticipate and mitigate these high-impact events. Drawing from his experience across government and electric utility roles, he emphasizes the critical need for electric utilities to incorporate climatology, the study of long-term weather patterns, into their risk management strategies.

Here are 3 key takeaways for electric utilities aiming to future-proof their grid

• Forecasts show the weather. Climatology shows the why behind the risk
  Traditional weather forecasting tells you what’s coming. But without the context of historical weather extremes, it’s hard to know whether an event is routine or unprecedented. Understanding that a wind event, for example, is in the 99.5th percentile of past data can change the entire response strategy.
• Climatology reveals anomalies — and that’s where Black Swans hide.
  Wildfires in regions with little prior history, like Oregon’s 2020 Labor Day fires, show how fast the risk landscape can shift. Localized climatological modeling can identify those rare but high-impact scenarios before they happen.
• Local fire weather behavior is key to smarter decisions.
  A 40 mph gust isn’t the same everywhere. Trees in wind-sheltered zones respond differently than those accustomed to strong gusts. Understanding these localized dynamics helps set better thresholds for action and improve operational resilience.

By understanding the historical climatological context of their service areas, electric utilities can better identify anomalies in current weather patterns and shift from reactive responses to proactive risk mitigation. That means greater accuracy, earlier warnings and a stronger, resilient grid.

Read his full article in Utility Dive to learn how electric utilities are leveraging climatology, ignition modeling, wildfire spread predictions, and impact analysis to forecast risk days in advance. See how leading electric utilities are applying these tools like weather forecasts, ignition models, on-demand wildfire spread predictions, in practice to forecast & monitor wildfire risks before disaster strikes.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Electric companies need to leverage a comprehensive understanding of their asset wildfire risk to plan for a safer future. With applied technology, they can reconstruct past fire seasons to truly define outlier events and model the consequences of asset-caused ignitions to identify trends and patterns that better prepare them for future wildfire risks. A shifting regulatory and legal landscape around wildfire liability is requiring electric companies to think differently about risk.

Furthermore, by contextualizing future events with a robust database of historical risks, electric companies can effectively monitor the frequency and intensity of weather events and identify specific assets along their lines that will be most impacted by climate change. This proactive approach to risk management not only ensures the safety of assets and communities, but also helps in minimizing the potential consequences of asset-caused wildfires.

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.

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.