Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety adopts wildfire mitigation maturity model and survey

The Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety adopted a wildfire mitigation maturity model and accompanying survey guidelines and spreadsheet on March 19, 2025, agency staff said at a public meeting held by videoconference.

The maturity model is intended as "a quantitative method to assess electrical corporation wildfire risk mitigation capabilities," Dakota Smith, program project supervisor in the Office's Electrical Safety Policy Division, said during the meeting. Smith said the model is organized into seven categories and 38 total capabilities and is part of the agency's Wildfire Mitigation Plan (WMP) guidelines suite.

The nut graf: Agency staff said the model and survey are designed to measure electrical corporations' current maturity in mitigating wildfire and outage risk, drive year-over-year improvement and create a quantitative record of utility maturity growth for future review.

At the meeting Tony Marino, deputy director of the Electrical Infrastructure Directorate, said he was acting under delegated authority from the Office's director to adopt the guidelines. Marino announced adoption during the meeting; the record shows no public speakers submitted oral comments during the scheduled comment period. Staff said written comments and a question-and-answer session informed revisions between the draft and proposed final versions.

Staff described three clarifying changes made between the draft and proposed final guidelines. Smith said the Office clarified where "minimum Energy Safety requirements" apply across affected capabilities; updated language in capability 12 to change "facility guidelines" to "facility design and operation" for consistency with the sub-capability description; and clarified in capability 32 that "emergency support services" refers to services for impacted customers.

Smith also summarized the procedural record: the Office published a draft of the maturity model and survey guidelines on Feb. 10; it received written comments from joint investor-owned utilities, held a Q&A session the following week, and reported that reply comments were due on the 12th but none were received.

The formal action recorded at the meeting adopted the Wildfire Mitigation Maturity Model and Survey Guidelines and the maturity survey spreadsheet. The meeting record does not list a mover, a second, or a roll-call vote tally; the stated outcome was adoption under the director's delegation to Marino. Staff said a clean version of the guidelines and the maturity survey spreadsheet will be published on the Office's website and the guidelines docket by close of business on March 20 and encouraged interested parties to subscribe to the WMP guidelines and evaluation dockets.

The meeting adjourned after the adoption announcement.