From Grid Hardening to Grid Intelligence: The Next Era of Wildfire Resilience

The recent surge in wildfires across North America has brought attention to the operations of utilities serving affected communities. As evacuation orders and smoke-filled skies become a seasonal norm, the question on everyone's mind is: "What early warning signs were there before ignition, and did utilities act on them?"

The last decade of wildfire mitigation focused on grid hardening, a multi-year construction project that involved vegetation management, covered conductor, sectionalizing devices, undergrounding, and faster-acting protection settings. While this approach made the electric grid harder to ignite, it has reached an economic ceiling. Undergrounding, for instance, costs several million dollars per mile, and no utility can afford to underground its entire service territory in a short period.

The next era of wildfire resilience will not be built by smarter infrastructure alone. Instead, it will require a risk-management discipline that involves technologists working alongside utilities to identify high-risk areas. This approach allows utilities to retire more risk with a fraction of the capital and leave in service what does not need replacing.

The grid is already becoming a sensing network that enables this approach. Metering infrastructure, line sensors, distribution automation, weather networks, and communications systems produce a continuous stream of signals on voltage anomalies, loading patterns, momentary faults, and equipment behavior. These signals can help utilities learn about potential failures beforehand, giving them confidence in providing a reliable and affordable service.

When a utility can read and act on these signals in real-time, several things change:

### Shutoffs Become More Surgical

Utilities can cut power to specific areas, rather than entire circuits or districts, reducing the impact on customers. This approach is particularly important for vulnerable populations, such as those on oxygen concentrators, well pumps, or medical baseline recipients.

### Crews Deployed to Acute Territory for Rapid Restoration

Inspection programs can be optimized using pattern recognition software trained on years of failure history. This allows utilities to identify high-risk areas and deploy crews to those areas, rather than spending equal effort on every mile.

### Capital Invested in the Right Miles for Undergrounding

Utilities can make more informed decisions about which lines to underground, using observed asset behavior and modeled risk rather than territory-wide averages. This approach can retire more risk per dollar than any single piece of equipment.

### Fast, Rapid Response

The criticality of fast, rapid response cannot be overstated. Fires start in seconds, and analysis must be real-time to enable fast operator decisions. This can involve protection settings that trip faster, automatic segment isolation, and crew dispatch before the failure rather than after the fire.

In conclusion, the next era of wildfire resilience will require a shift from grid hardening to grid intelligence. By working together, technologists and utilities can identify high-risk areas, make data-driven decisions, and take a surgical approach to protecting the grid and customers from wildfires.