When I talk with electric utility leaders, I’m encouraged to hear how many recognize the increasing risk that wildfires pose to their companies, assets, and the communities they serve. As temperatures are rising, energy companies across the United States are challenged with reducing wildfire risk and increasing their reliability as part of their on-going operations. This includes prioritizing vegetation management plans, assessing asset hardening, building their situational awareness capability, and positively sharing all this work with both regulators and residents. As droughts and energy demands increase due to climate change, it has become apparent that wildfires are not just a “California issue” anymore. The challenge faced by electric utility leaders – now from across the Western United States and elsewhere – is identifying how they can successfully guide their utility’s response. So, here are 3 ways you can stay ahead of your wildfire risk:
First, you need to understand the potential consequence from asset-ignited wildfires. This is more than just wildfire ignition modeling. Why is one possible wildfire worse than another? It is important to remember that not all ignitions are created equal. One possible ignition may start a fire in a remote area, while another may burn down a community. So, it’s the foundational piece to model and then know what assets are of most concern. To know what de-energization and PSPS decision making may be needed on the riskiest assets. To see what the impact is going to be across people, potential fatalities, and buildings lost. But, with a plethora of options, but limited staffing and budgets, how do you know which asset to harden first? Your risk managers need a longer-term view, leveraging weather and landscape data over 10+ years. This way they can identify which assets are consistently the highest liability for consequences from an ignition and then prioritize them for hardening.
Second, you need to understand how the probability of ignition is crucial to your asset’s wildfire risk. Beyond understanding the consequences of a wildfire resulting from your assets, you also need to see the probability of that wildfire occurring from one asset over another. If focused solely on conditional risk, then a utility may unknowingly assume the probability of failure and ignition is uniform across their assets. The failure of an asset causing a wildfire depends on its attributes, such as equipment fatigue, deterioration, conductor type, age, span length, and number of phases. There are additional environmental variables such as the fuel type, vegetation canopy density, height and slope, and the local terrain characteristics. This is why it is extremely important for utilities to quantify the expected risk from their assets by determining the probability of an ignition occurring, multiplied by the consequence of said ignition. This helps you efficiently prioritize grid-hardening and define areas of highest concern across your service territory for your vegetation management planning, staffing, and budgeting.
Third, you need to understand the importance of integrating advanced weather data with your asset outage analysis to quantify your overall wildfire risk. Leveraging real time high-resolution weather dataset forecasts over your entire service territory and then simulating fire ignitions across all your assets allows you to tie results of those simulations back to the asset itself. To achieve this, you look at two components of outage analytics. The first is probability of failure (POF), which is a failure along a line segment that results in a spark or burning material on the ground. This can relate to a knockdown or vegetation contact as well. The second component is the probability of ignition (POI), which is the probability that burning material – the coupling of wind, temperature, and vegetation information – will create a wildfire that needs suppression. If you combine probability of failure with the probability of ignition you can determine the likelihood of a specific asset starting a wildfire. This helps you identify long term system hardening planning priorities and staging personnel during upcoming windstorms. Instead of forecasting wind gusts, your utility can start forecasting possible ignitions.
These three focuses will make you more informed for budgeting decisions around prioritizing vegetation management plans, refining asset hardening decision-making, and strengthening your utility’s situational awareness. You can stay ahead of your wildfire risk and ensure your utility’s success. Learn more about the modeling science behind this work and how that science is put into practice at www.Technosylva.com.
