Expertise Resilience, Wildfire, and Asset Health

E3 helps utilities measure wildfire and outage risk, working with utility experts to compose mitigation strategies that prioritize risk reduction within the constraints of limited budgeting and regulatory compliance. We build the risk models that underpin wildfire mitigation plans, compare candidate programs on a consistent basis of risk reduced against cost, and support the filings that carry those plans through a commission. We also value resilience for customers and communities, from what an outage costs to whether microgrids and customer technologies are worth the installation costs.

Commissions have demanded increasing rigor from utilities, insisting on specific metrics and maximal transparency. We work with utilities to tailor our methods to hold up in their unique regulatory environments. That starts with identifying which data, models, and partner inputs a commission’s guidelines call for, then bringing them together into a single risk framework.

Our risk models start from a utility’s own record of outages and ignitions, plus details on the age and condition of its equipment. Supplementing with public or generic data as needed, we add data on the terrain, vegetation, and weather surrounding each asset. The robustness of this combined data determines the approach to development of an outage probability model that gives a view of where a fire is most likely to start. We pair these results with standard fire spread outputs from specialist modeling firms, matching each to outage probabilities under the same weather conditions, and translate them into monetized consequences based on area burned, damage to structures, the value of power not delivered, and other metrics drawn from utility precedent and commission guidance.

Undergrounding, covered conductor, vegetation management, and changes to protective device settings all reduce risk by different amounts at very different costs. We help to quantify those tradeoffs so utilities can weigh programs against one another and against the budget available.

We work on resilience more broadly as well, quantifying what outages cost residents, businesses, and critical facilities, and evaluating whether microgrids, customer solar and storage, and vehicle-to-home options deliver enough value to justify their cost. Leveraging our decades of experience in regulatory proceedings across a variety of practice areas, we work with utilities to build regulatory strategies that satisfy today’s commission guidelines while also laying a clear path for future improvements to analytics and capital prioritization.