PG&E Submits 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan or WMP
California-based PG&E submitted on 2/5/21 its 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan (WMP) under the direction of the Wildfire Safety Division of the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC). The WMP is mandated to incorporate lessons learned from the previous year, offer new and improved tactics and technology for mitigating the wildfire risk, and provide updated details on PG&E’s Community Safety Program (CWSP) and Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) program.
3 Key Areas of Focus in the 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan
The document itself is long and arduous, but the key areas of focus can essentially be boiled down to the following:
- Lowering the risk of forest fires by: (1) improving the inspection and proactive repair protocols for equipment, (2) improving vegetation management, and (3) investing in grid-hardening technology.
- Improving the ability to provide advance warnings by deploying additional weather stations, high-definition cameras, sensors, advanced weather prediction models and other monitoring technologies.
- Ensuring continuous improvement in the dreaded PSPS program, so that it is used less frequently and only as an absolute last resort.
Some of the specific initiatives mentioned in the 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan that are designed to limit outages include plans to enhance the company’s Wildfire Risk Model and the associated machine learning algorithms, improve the alerts the company sends to it customers, install additional devices designed to limit the scope of outages, deploy additional microgrids, increase the size and availability of inspection and restoration crews, open Community Resource Centers to support customers without electricity, and improve the company’s website functionality.
The bottom line is that PG&E seems to be doing everything in its reasonable power (no pun intended) to address the fact that it must operate effectively, and keep as many people happy as possible, in a geological environment that seems ripe to either burn to the ground or fall off into the Pacific Ocean at any given moment. It’s a situation that I am certainly not envious of, but I do feel that PG&E’s 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan is another important step in the right direction.
