San Diego Gas & Electric has unveiled its updated, “cutting-edge” Wildfire and Climate Resilience Center, which serves as a hub for research, development, and implementation of wildfire mitigation solutions.
The center brings AI and predictive modeling together with shared technology and intelligence with emergency responders in an effort to help enable a swift and integrated response to regional threats.
The Wildfire and Climate Resilience Center also serves as SDG&E’s new Emergency Operations Center, equipped with advanced communication and coordination tools, which is an important hub during extreme weather events and major disasters.
The center includes:
- Advanced weather monitoring: The company’s weather monitoring systems use millions of historical weather data points going back to 2010 to assist in training AI-based wind forecasting models, including one of the first AI-trained Santa Ana Wind Gust forecast models in the industry.
- AI and machine learning: These technologies can help predict and mitigate wildfire impacts on the energy grid. SDG&E conducts more than 10 million virtual wildfire simulations daily to inform operational wildfire risk models, and uses more than 3.8 million drone images of company infrastructure to train AI-based inspection models.
- Partnerships with academia: SDG&E partners with academic institutions such as Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, San Jose State University, San Diego Supercomputer Center and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center to develop weather products to better anticipate extreme events, visualize and share weather and fuel moisture data, analyze fire potential and detect wildfires using real-time satellite data.
- Community collaboration: SDG&E works with local communities and stakeholders to achieve more inclusive and effective climate resilience efforts.
- Fire-resistant infrastructure: The company continues to invest in fire-hardened systems, including undergrounding, steel poles, and vegetation management, that aim to reduce wildfire risk.
- Workforce training: Training programs are equipping SDG&E’s workforce to manage and maintain a resilient grid.
Over the past decade, SDG&E says it has invested more than $3 billion in measures to prevent against wildfires. As of March 2024, SDG&E’s wildfire-related costs accounted for roughly 10% of SDG&E’s total system revenue requirement collected from customers, compared to 6% in 2023, according to a report from the California Public Advocates Office. Between January 2023 and March 2024, wildfire-related costs increased by 62%.
A revenue requirement is the total amount of money that a regulated utility is authorized to collect from its customers through rates to cover its costs and includes an opportunity for the utility to earn a fair return on its investments. Each utility files a proposal with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for approval of its revenue requirement, which typically consists of operating expenses, depreciation, capital investments, and a rate of return on those investments.
Between January 2023 and April 2024, the California Public Advocates Office said it saw a marked increase in the total revenue requirements of California’s three major investor-owned utilities, with wildfire-related costs making up a larger portion of the total revenue requirement. Wildfire-related costs include vegetation management, such as tree trimming, wildfire hardening, such as undergrounding power lines, and rebuilding utility infrastructure damaged by wildfires. Depending on the utility, these costs make up 10% to 24% of total revenue requirements.
There is no national standard for utility wildfire mitigation programs or financial safety net for utility-caused ignitions. The California Wildfire Fund was established in 2019 to distribute risk among the state’s three investor-owned utilities — PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — but utilities elsewhere are forced to go it alone, despite their vested interest in each other’s strategies.
A wildfire impacting one utility has a cascading effect on insurance premiums for the broader industry, experts say. Policy underwriters are largely moving toward only offering risk-adjusted pricing, meaning an individual utility is judged on the resilience of the industry at large, not their own wildfire strategy. As a result, government organizations and larger utilities may need to subsidize wildfire investments for smaller utilities, like municipalities and cooperatives.
A suite of advanced tools powered by AI has emerged to help utilities combat wildfire risks. These satellites, sensors, cameras, and software programs aim to identify a utility’s risks — aging infrastructure, vegetation, fuel sources, etc. — and pinpoint ignitions in real time. Since ignitions often occur in remote areas, wildfires can grow for days, gaining momentum, undetected. The return on investment for AI cameras can be met in as little as one fire, utility leaders say.
