PG&E outlines risk-model upgrades, inspection cadence and mitigation priorities in 2026–28 wildfire plan

Pacific Gas and Electric Company presented its 2026–28 base Wildfire Mitigation Plan to an Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety public workshop in May 2025, describing updates to its wildfire risk models, inspection practices and methods for measuring mitigation effectiveness. The company said it will use an updated wildfire distribution risk model (version 4) and a 24‑hour fire consequence simulation to guide where it conducts inspections, vegetation work, equipment replacements and other mitigations.

Why this matters: PG&E serves large parts of Northern and Central California where utility‑caused ignitions can lead to catastrophic wildfires, large power shutoffs and costly liability under California’s inverse‑condemnation legal framework. The company told regulators and stakeholders the new modeling and inspection practices are intended to better target limited resources toward the highest‑risk assets and to reduce ignition counts over time.

PG&E said the updated distribution risk model moves from a pixel‑based approach to an asset‑level probability-of‑failure approach, allowing the company to compute failure probabilities for specific poles, transformers and other named assets rather than only for 100‑meter pixels. “We are anchoring on the wildfire distribution risk model version 4,” said Andrew Obranches, PG&E vice president of wildfire mitigation. The model includes additional years of outage and ignition data, extends the fire‑spread simulation to 24 hours, and incorporates new proxies for egress and suppression and for community vulnerability where feasible. PG&E said the underlying GIS data vintage used for the model training was updated to January 2023.

Inspection cadence and how findings feed operations: PG&E said detailed transmission and distribution inspections operate on a three‑year cycle, with added aerial (drone) inspections…