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Jeff Pauska is vice president of product management for IFS Copperleaf.
As climate patterns shift, extended fire seasons and expanding high-risk zones have exponentially increased the social, financial and regulatory consequences of wildfire events. With lives and often billions of dollars at stake, state and provincial regulators are putting mounting pressure on electric utilities to make risk-based investment decisions to halt the damage. Utilities must act with speed, transparency and unprecedented accuracy.
Ultimately, modern wildfire mitigation for North American utilities is a profound capital allocation challenge amid the risk of extreme threat uncertainty. Traditional approaches to mitigate the effects of wildfire disruption using basic inspection cycles and static maintenance schedules are no match for the devastation that wildfires cause.
Wildfire mitigation has evolved into a highly complex, capital-intensive investment decision that must be rigorously defensible to regulatory commissions and stakeholders at every level — not to mention make financial sense for the utility.
