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Energy Safety holds Q&A on draft wildfire maturity model, clarifies survey scoring and deadlines
Summary
The Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety held a Teams question-and-answer session on its draft wildfire maturity model and Excel survey tool, answering industry questions about scoring definitions, the notes field, validation requirements and submission deadlines.
The Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety held a question-and-answer session on its draft wildfire maturity model and maturity-survey guidelines via Microsoft Teams to walk electrical corporations through scoring, documentation and upcoming submission deadlines.
The session, led by Dakota Smith, a supervisor at the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety, reviewed the maturity model’s structure — seven categories and 38 capabilities — and the Excel-based survey ECs will use to report existing and planned maturity levels. "The maturity model is a quantitative method to assess electrical corporation wildfire risk mitigation capabilities," Smith said, adding the model is intended to drive year-over-year improvement and to create a quantitative record for future examination.
Smith described substantive changes in the draft, including adding a capability called "best management practices for transmission right of ways," removing or consolidating overlapping subcapabilities for clarity, and providing the survey as an Excel workbook for electrical corporations to complete and submit. Smith said staff incorporated guideline edits into the survey workbook and confirmed that written comments filed by stakeholders have been received and are under review.
Willie Mojak, representing Southern California Edison, asked several technical and procedural questions about scoring language. Mojak sought clarity on what the draft means by items being "automatically integrated" into predictive models, how Energy Safety defines "blind model validation," and whether identical scoring descriptions that appear in multiple capabilities should be evaluated separately for each capability. Smith said the office would follow up with more detailed definitions where needed and reiterated that the Excel workbook includes an "electrical corporation notes" column for ECs to record assumptions or interpretations used when assigning maturity levels.
On scoring guidance, Smith told participants to evaluate each scoring description in the context of the specific capability in which it appears. For combined inputs-and-outputs scoring descriptions, Smith said ECs should assign the maturity level that best matches both inputs and outputs; if an organization meets some but not all criteria for a higher level, score the lower level and use the notes column to document partial compliance.
Smith also reviewed procedural deadlines. Opening comments were due March 3; reply comments are due by the end of day on the 12th. Smith said EC survey submissions are scheduled to begin April 18 and continue through July 25. She added that if major changes are made after the draft guidelines, Energy Safety will publish a second draft and open another comment period; if no major changes are required, adoption is currently scheduled for "next Wednesday at 10 a.m.," per the draft schedule. Smith said the session was being recorded and that the recording and docket materials will be posted on Energy Safety’s docket and website.
The session closed with Smith saying staff will provide written answers this week to any questions not resolved in the meeting and thanked participants for joining.
