Asset Investment Under Fire as the Wildfire Season Approaches: How Utilities are Taking Action!

­Wildfires have proven to cause catastrophic damage to communities, infrastructure, and the wider environment, putting citizen lives, and billions of dollars at risk.

Utilities are under immense pressure to make capital decisions that minimize the damage, whether it be heavy infrastructure hardening or operational shutoffs. These risk-based decisions are already underway, but some utilities are still using tools that are not fit for purpose in the new era of changing wildfire patterns and increasing pressure on power usage. But there are tools available to take more portfolio-wide approach to asset investment planning, that will enable these utilities to confidently prioritize projects, justify expenditure, and demonstrate that every investment contributes to reducing wildfire risk.

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.

Turning reactive wildfire mitigation into proactive wildfire mitigation

 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 themselves.

North American utilities are forced to choose between a diverse array of mitigation options, depending on regional priorities and localized threats. These range from heavy capital physical upgrades, such as system-wide undergrounding and installing covered conductors, to disruptive operational interventions, such as Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS).

Decisions must be made and justified to regulators, stakeholders, and the public in general.

It’s all systems go in the Golden State

In California, for example, as part of the utility’s mitigation plan, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) intends to underground 1,900 miles of lines by 2027 and 5,000 miles from 2028-2037. Other fire mitigation efforts include clearing 4.4 million trees, as well as installing more than 1,600 weather stations and 700+ high-definition cameras with AI capability.

During Wildfire Awareness Month, PG&E unveiled a Continuous Monitoring Center in San Ramon. The center pulls data from more than 5.5 million sensors across the grid. Machine learning models scan that data continuously, looking for patterns that often show up before equipment fails, outages occur, or fires start.

Spending ramps up in Hawaii

Meanwhile, Hawaiian Electric is projecting nearly $500 million in wildfire mitigation spending over the next three years after state regulators approved its 2025–2027 wildfire mitigation plan. Hawaiian Electric projects about $60 million to install covered conductors on roughly 56 miles of overhead lines on Oʻahu, Maui and Hawaiʻi Island by the end of 2027, at an average cost of about $1.07 million per mile.

Vegetation management and inspections account for another $41.5 million, while asset inspections and repairs total about $54.7 million over the three-year period. The company also forecasts $28 million for situational awareness tools, including weather stations, cameras and monitoring systems.

A reason behind every decision – else it won’t pass!

The primary hurdle for utility leaders is not simply identifying where the highest ignition risk lies, but determining exactly how to allocate limited capital across these competing priorities to minimize total enterprise exposure.  And of course, every intervention strategy carries vastly different implications for risk reduction, cost, deployment speed, and long-term grid performance.

But critical risk, asset, and financial data often remain fragmented across different departments, severely limiting a utility's visibility into where a specific investment will actually reduce the most risk.

The digital tools to transform risk into a plan of attack on wildfires

It’s all about being able to understand risk and the digital tools are now there to help and guide senior leaders and tactical teams to ensure they avoid exposing their organizations to unacceptable risks. It requires a shift toward a portfolio-based planning approach, using asset investment planning tools that help organizations move away from evaluating mitigation on an isolated, single-project basis and toward comprehensive, asset-wide optimization.

Instead of subjectively asking which individual line needs to be hardened first, all portfolio assets and mitigation options are assessed together so the investments delivering the greatest tangible risk reduction become mathematically clear.

Click image to enlarge

Here are four key areas where asset investment planning tools are helping utilities fight back against wildfire threats defensible, data-driven decisions that protect assets, communities, and enterprise value.

1.         Making risk reduction the priority

To achieve the highest return on investment, utilities must navigate an overwhelming number of variables, balancing numerous intervention options against strict financial and regulatory constraints. Asset investment planning tools utilize an advanced optimization engine that carefully evaluates thousands of potential intervention combinations across different assets, budget scenarios, and time horizons. This deep analytical capability generates a transparent, portfolio-level plan designed to explicitly maximize risk reduction while aligning with the utility's financial limits.

2.         Collect data, and then use it for useful mitigation efforts

Utilities possess valuable wildfire risk data, but they often struggle to convert that intelligence into defensible, investment-grade decisions. They face the complex challenge of determining exactly where ignition risks are highest, understanding the financial and safety consequences, and deciding how to allocate limited capital for maximum impact. Asset investment planning tools resolve this by transforming vendor-agnostic risk data into a financially quantified expected loss. By integrating this intelligence with asset attributes, intervention costs, and capital constraints, the platform optimizes investment decisions to deliver the greatest risk reduction per dollar spent, resulting in a transparent, regulator-ready mitigation program.

3.         Quantify the true costs

Wildfire mitigation decisions are incredibly complex because they extend far beyond standard physical asset upgrades. Disruptive operational measures, such as Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS), carry heavy financial, reputational, and community impacts that must be weighed directly alongside infrastructure investments. Asset investment planning software enables utilities to carefully evaluate these complex trade-offs between heavy, capital-intensive mitigation strategies and immediate operational interventions, allowing organizations to mathematically quantify both the true cost of taking action and the cost of doing nothing. 

4.         Geographical context matters!

Utilities need an effective way to convey complex asset-level risks and investment impacts to a diverse group of stakeholders who require clear geographic context to understand the data. With two-way mapping and spatial data analytics technology embedded in asset investment planning software, stakeholders are able to visually explore asset-level risks and the impacts of specific investments directly within their geographic context. This spatial visualization drastically strengthens communication and alignment across technical teams, executives, regulatory bodies, and local communities.

Click image to enlarge

The future of wildfire resilience starts with smarter capital decisions

The future of wildfire mitigation isn't about choosing between undergrounding lines, covered conductors, vegetation management, or Public Safety Power Shutoffs—it's about understanding which combination of investments delivers the greatest reduction in risk for every dollar spent.

A portfolio-based approach to asset investment planning gives utilities the ability to evaluate thousands of investment scenarios, quantify trade-offs, and demonstrate why one course of action delivers greater value than another.

Rather than responding to wildfire threats one project at a time, utilities can build balanced, resilient investment portfolios that adapt as conditions evolve.

IFS Copperleaf