Environmental Monitoring Action Plan
From an electric power system and wildfire interaction perspective, environmental monitoring has three key objectives. The first objective is to accomplish periodic physical inspections and observations of the power system right of way and its vegetation to better understand when remediation actions are needed to avoid faults, avoid tree fall-ins, or to avoid igniting ground fuels. The second objective is to have near real time visibility on the regional and local weather conditions to better prepare for storms and to respond to weather related outages. The third objective is having visual monitoring in place and to be able to detect smoke and fire starts and respond, before the incident becomes an uncontrolled wildfire
What is needed to accelerate the industry toward the 2030 Vision?
The consensus from the advisory group was that there are many important use cases for weather, vegetation health, and fire detection. While the periodic monitoring and inspection of vegetation in the right of way, is utility focused and is already allocated for with defined practices and budgets, the modeling and forecasting future states would be better served by conducting focused U.S. National Lab research instead of proposing electric utility demos.
The advisory team additionally emphasized the need for a more focused sub-advisory group that could help to define the resolution of the Fuelscape relevant parameters as there are different stakeholders that may have unique benefits from a certain resolution or with more frequent updates based on recent climate or weather conditions and so on. Specific considerations around frequency, resolution, and training needs are described more thoroughly in the Environmental Monitoring details section of this report. The key takeaway was that focused National Lab research could equally benefit fire response organizations, foresters, communities, and other interested stakeholders beyond just the power industry.
Next Steps
These recommendations have already turned into some new National Lab work to create wildfire resilience standards and metrics for utilities. The outcomes are expected to support a multi-faceted wildfire strategy that considers risk under current conditions, risk reduction and prevention measures, pro-active response, and recovery as well as preparedness actions. The work will also develop analytics data layers and tools that can inform and validate risk mitigation practices
To support this effort EPRI will bring together subject matter experts from both EPRI and from member advisory groups and facilitate four regional workshops to get input on both wildfire climate change interests and fuel scape interests for the electric utility industry. These particular interest groups will bring together resilience and adaption experience for both wildfire risk and for climate risk to come up with approaches that will make fire modeling and its use cases more consistent regionally and more actionable. If you are interested in learning more about this effort, please email ddorr@epri.com
Which 2030 Future States are Impacted by this Work?
- Unified regional and North American wide fuelscape layers that are (nearer to real time) accurate.
- Replicable methodology to integrate wind, climate, and weather data into fire risk and spread modeling tools
- A unified national fire weather forecasting service