On the hunt for cheap and fast strategies to prevent deadly wildfires, utilities across the U.S. and Europe are contracting with a handful of artificial intelligence startups to map wildfire risk along thousands of miles of power lines, picking out individual trees to cut and poles to replace.<\/p>\n
The most obvious way to prevent power equipment from sparking a blaze is to bury lines underground. But at a cost of upwards of $3 million a mile, many investor-owned utilities are limiting themselves to just a few hundred miles of buried lines per year. That\u2019s proved to be a major business opportunity for several tech companies that use machine learning to deliver custom recommendations for targeted, relatively low-cost fixes \u2014 including some that can be paid for from maintenance budgets.<\/p>\n
Take Massachusetts-based Overstory, which analyzes high-definition satellite images to spot trees most likely to topple or drop a limb onto power distribution lines \u2014 those most in need of trimming. The company started out making tools to find and discourage deforestation, said Chief Executive Officer Fiona Spruill. Overstory pivoted after a realization: \u201cWe could have a huge impact from a climate standpoint, in that we could help prevent wildfires,\u201d she said. The company recently closed an oversubscribed Series B funding round that pulled in more than $43 million.<\/p>\n
Overstory\u2019s clients now include American Electric Power Co.\u2019s Texas utility and California\u2019s Pacific Gas & Electric Co., along with other major U.S. utilities, Spruill said. UK-based National Grid Plc, meanwhile, has signed a deal with Rhizome, a San Francisco-based climate tech firm, for custom modeling to suggest investments in fire safety.<\/p>\n
The stakes for utilities are high: Edison International\u2019s Southern California utility is facing lawsuits for its possible link to the Eaton fire in Altadena, which killed 19 people in January. Wildfire liability from deadly blazes in Northern California pushed PG&E to declare bankruptcy in 2019.<\/p>\n
In the years since, PG&E has worked with Overstory\u2019s staff to map the precise location and health of individual trees across its vast service area, which stretches for more than 500 miles (805 kilometers) in California. The premise is that it\u2019s cheaper and more comprehensive than sending utility workers to inspect trees from the ground \u2014 or deploying helicopters to spot problem areas from the air. <\/p>\n
To train its AI, Overstory relied on a large team of arborists who contributed on-the-ground measurements and observations of diseased or dying trees. The company\u2019s data and risk predictions are loaded into a custom web platform, with suggestions for what to trim and how often. <\/p>\n
Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mishal Thadani said his company set out to help utilities decide which fire risk interventions \u2014 from cutting trees to replacing flammable wooden poles and installing new safety equipment \u2014 will deliver the most benefit for the cost. Rhizome\u2019s gridFIRM model can parse an array of site-specific information about a given grid, including local weather trends and maintenance records, and factor in information about nearby properties and populations that would be impacted in a fire.<\/p>\n
National Grid plans to start using the model soon in the UK and already employs it on grids in New York and Massachusetts. Those states may not traditionally be thought of as fire prone, but the amount of land area burned within their borders more than tripled from 2023 to 2024, according to data from the U.S. National Interagency Coordination Center, a federal hub for tracking and managing wildfire response. <\/p>\n
Rhizome\u2019s technology has already rewired some of the utility\u2019s assumptions about its fire risk, according to Casey Kirkpatrick, National Grid\u2019s director of group strategic engineering. Previously, National Grid assumed it was worse in areas near bigger cities with more fire-ignition sources, along with sections of the grid near overgrown forests. Some of the biggest risks, however, lurked in suburbs. <\/p>\n
Human-caused climate change is driving more volatile and extreme weather events. Heavy winter rains allow grasses and brush to flourish and are followed by summer heat domes and flash droughts that kill off plants and weaken trees. Researchers have found that drought stress can also lead to an outgrowth of disease in forested areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of climate change, trees are dying in new and different ways than they have in the past,\u201d said Spruill of Overstory, meaning a maintenance plan that \u201cmay have worked 10 years ago is not necessarily going to work anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Periodically trimming trees near power lines has been a mainstay of utility maintenance programs. Some companies have experimented with more aggressive cutting, but it may not be the most cost-effective way to control fire risk across an entire system, said power systems researcher Duncan Callaway, who leads UC Berkeley\u2019s Energy and Resources Group.<\/p>\n
Callaway was part of a team that recently examined PG&E\u2019s fire-mitigation programs. Fast-trip safety settings that quickly shut off the power when equipment begins to fail delivered the most benefits for the money, according to the team\u2019s analysis in the journal Nature Climate Change, preventing about 80% of potential fire starts. More targeted trimming in known problem areas could help reduce the remaining risk of sparking a blaze, Callaway said, but can\u2019t eliminate it entirely.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s always going to be some risk of ignition unless we spend just extraordinary amounts of money\u201d to bury all distribution lines, Callaway said. \u201cIf that cost is making it difficult for people to pay their bills, which is certainly already front of mind, at some point you have to live with the discomfort of some residual risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as utilities confront potentially ruinous financial fallout from wildfire-related lawsuits, fines and insurance premiums, the demand for any tool that can drive down residual risk is increasing. Overstory recently rolled out a model to help determine the presence of dry grasses and brush at the base of high-powered transmission lines, which were tied to two devastating fires sparked by PG&E in 2018 and 2019.<\/p>\n
The Kincade blaze and the deadly Camp fire \u2014 which helped push the company toward bankruptcy \u2014 \u201chappened basically at the transmission tower,\u201d said Andy Abranches, PG&E\u2019s vice president of wildfire mitigation. Both could have been prevented by clearing out the dry brush that lay beneath the towers, ready to burn. \u201cEven if the equipment failed, the sparks that it threw would have landed on bare earth,\u201d he said. \u201cThere would have been no fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosenthal and Wertz write for Bloomberg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the hunt for cheap and fast strategies to prevent deadly wildfires, utilities across the U.S. and Europe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9285,7,9,8,1804,44367,3802,44366,44361,44365,44362,2663,44364,3604,13017,44363,21699],"class_list":["post-76831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-brush","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-company","tag-costly-wildfire-liability","tag-fire","tag-fire-risk-intervention","tag-individual-tree","tag-large-team","tag-massachusetts-based-overstory","tag-mile","tag-national-grid-plc","tag-pge","tag-power-line","tag-rhizome","tag-utility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}