Contributed by Jared Leader | SEPA Senior Director, Resilience & Globe on the Research & Industry Strategy
Wildfire risk is no longer a regional concern or a seasonal inconvenience. Communities from the Texas panhandle to Lahaina, Maui, to Paradise and Los Angeles have experienced firsthand how quickly wildfire can alter lives, livelihoods, and the places people call home. Snowpack across much of the West is well below historical averages, vegetation is drier than usual heading into summer, and longer fireweather windows are expanding the threat well beyond historically high-risk geographies — cities and towns in the Midwest, the Southeast, and the Southern Great Plains are now in the picture.
When wildfire intersects with the electric grid, the consequences are staggering: costs to communities, infrastructure, customer trust, and the utility’s own financial position. What has changed the equation for utilities is not just the scale of the risk, but the growing complexity of managing it under simultaneous pressure from regulators, insurers, customers, and communities. The good news: the technologies and science utilities needed to meet this moment exist. The critical gap is not the tools — it’s integrating insights in the right format to make actionable decisions during high-stakes moments.
The Gap Isn’t Technology. It’s Integration.
For most of the utility industry’s history, wildfire risk wasn’t managed as its own category. It was handled indirectly, folded into other routine functions without ever being explicitly named or assessed. Crews trimmed vegetation on fixed cycles. Equipment was inspected periodically and replaced based on age. Capital investment decisions were built on broad assumptions — which geographic zones were highest risk, the infrastructure’s age, and the last previous upgrade. It was a reasonable system for the utility risk environment for most of the last century.
That environment has fundamentally changed. Climate-driven shifts in temperature, humidity, and wind patterns have extended fire seasons, accelerated fire spread, and pushed high-risk fire behavior into areas that historically saw little of it. Fixed-cycle vegetation management and age-based asset assumptions were calibrated for a different threat landscape. They no longer reflect where risk actually lives or how fast it moves. A new generation of technology companies is helping utilities meet this moment. These platforms allow utilities to map vegetation conditions at the level of individual line spans, assess the actual condition of specific components rather than estimating from age, model fire behavior under forecasted weather conditions, and detect smoke in its earliest stages. Many utilities are still early in acquiring these tools. Others have moved further, often acquiring several at once, but end up with decentralized information that doesn’t talk to itself. That’s a gap of its own: when data from one system does not inform decisions in the next, when risk intelligence does not flow through to capital plans, and when the right information does not reach the right people before and during a fire weather event, the full value of these investments goes unrealized.
By convening leading technology providers, utility practitioners, and regulatory advisors from across the country, SEPA developed a first-of-its-kind framework that maps how wildfire mitigation technologies complement each other across the full risk lifecycle — from long-term planning to real-time response. The result: the Wildfire Technology Landscape: A Framework for U.S. Utilities, developed in partnership with Overstory, eSmart Systems, Pano AI, Rhizome, and Technosylva. Grounded in real utility experience, structured for regulatory defensibility, and designed to move the industry from fragmented pilots to coordinated deployment, this framework gives utilities, technology partners, and policymakers a shared, honest picture of wildfire technology integration for the first time.
The framework organizes the wildfire risk lifecycle into six stages — from Mitigation & Planning and Forecasting & Readiness, through Operational Actions and Detection, to Response and Recovery & Learning — each operating on a different clock and posing a distinct operational question utilities must answer.
For utilities deciding where to invest, when to act, and how to respond — often simultaneously and under pressure — the framework also gives utility teams across capital planning, vegetation management & forestry, system operations, emergency operations center & meteorology, and regulatory, legislative & external affairs a common language and a clear view of where each technology creates value and what technology enables across the utility enterprise.
Stage 1: Mitigation & Planning – Knowing Where Risk Actually Lives
To understand wildfire ignition risk, utilities need visibility into both the condition of the lines and the plants growing near them.
Vegetation is responsible for a significant share of wildfire ignitions near electric infrastructure, and vegetation growing into or falling onto power lines has contributed to some of the most destructive fires in recent history. When utilities trim on a fixed schedule across entire circuits, they treat every span the same, regardless of what’s actually growing there, how fast it’s growing, or how flammable it is under current conditions. Crews visit spans that don’t need attention, while the spans requiring attention go untouched until the next cycle. A better solution exists.
Asset condition tells the other half of the story. Equipment age has long served as the primary proxy for risk: older assets get flagged for replacement, newer ones are assumed to be fine. But two assets of the same age can pose very different risks depending on their design, their environment, and how they’ve held up over time.
Stage 2: Forecasting & Readiness – Turning Risk Data Into Decisions That Hold Up
Utilities of every size and structure face a version of the same challenge: deciding where to invest, documenting why, and demonstrating what is working. The specific process varies by utility, but the need to justify spending, prioritize limited resources, and answer to the people who ultimately pay for it is universal. Those investments flow back to customers through regulated rates, cooperative margins, or municipal budgets.
Most utilities are still building capacity to aggregate risk intelligence across vegetation analytics, asset condition data, and fire behavior modeling into a coherent prioritization framework and produce documentation that walks stakeholders through the logic.
Stage 3: Operational Actions – Preparing Before Conditions Deteriorate
By the time fire weather arrives, the window for preparation has already closed. The utilities that perform best during a high-risk event are those that validate data flows, send risk rankings to operations teams, and pre-position crews before conditions turn.
Pre-season preparation also means knowing in advance which circuits would be candidates for a power shutoff and why. Public Safety Power Shutoffs are among the most consequential decisions a utility makes. Done well, with precise data, they protect communities. Done poorly — too broad, based on outdated assumptions — they cut power to people who depend on it without meaningfully reducing risk. The quality of data and the integration work done before fire season determine the defensibility of a shutoff decision.
Stage 4: Detection -The Moment Everything Depends On
Upstream work, such as risk mapping, capital investment, and pre-season preparation, reduces the likelihood and severity of wildfires near the grid. But when a fire starts, what matters is how fast anyone knows about it.
For most of the industry’s history, utilities found out about fires the way everyone else did: through a 911 call, a field crew report, or a neighbor. Camera-based detection networks that can identify smoke in its earliest stages and route confirmed alerts to both utility operations and fire agencies in real time are a relatively recent development still being adopted across the industry.
What Regulators and Consumer Advocates Need to See
Regulators and consumer advocates are essential participants in this conversation. The same wildfire risk that threatens communities flows directly into the rate cases, plan filings, and policy frameworks that commissioners and advocates are responsible for evaluating.
The question being asked in wildfire legislative and regulatory dockets across the country has evolved. It’s no longer just “what are utilities spending?” It’s “is it working?” Every dollar spent on wildfire mitigation is ultimately recovered from ratepayers, cooperative members, and residents who have a right to know that spending is producing real risk reduction.
Our report includes a practical framework for regulators and consumer advocates that identifies what strong wildfire mitigation programs look like and the questions worth asking when a plan falls short: specific, verifiable outcomes tied to real events, performance data tracked over time, and a clear explanation of how technologies work together, not just what each one does on its own.
The technology is here. Wildfire season doesn’t wait. The utilities ahead of the game are deploying integrated technologies and are starting to see the results.
The Wildfire Technology Landscape: A Framework for U.S. Utilities is available at sepapower.org. Utilities, regulators, and advisors interested in learning more can reach SEPA at [email protected].
About SEPA
The Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) is a national nonprofit leading the future of clean, affordable, resilient power. With nearly 1,000 members spanning utilities of every business model, state commissions and energy offices, consumer advocates, and the technology companies reshaping the grid, SEPA produces research, convenes the full ecosystem, and delivers practical guidance that informs some of the most consequential decisions being made in the energy sector right now. Learn more at sepapower.org.