Cal Advocates proposes project‑level, spatial reporting for utility risk mitigation; IOUs raise feasibility and confidentiality concerns

Cal Advocates, the Public Advocates Office at the California Public Utilities Commission, presented draft data templates at a CPUC technical working group meeting to require program‑level and project‑level reporting on utility risk‑mitigation work and to include spatial location data that would enable mapping and analysis.

The templates are intended to be filed with utilities’ Risk Assessment Mitigation Plans (RAMP) and general rate case (GRC) applications and then updated annually. Cal Advocates said the forms would consolidate program identifiers, forecast versus actual costs and work units, pre‑mitigated (baseline) risk, forecasted and actual risk reduction, mitigation effectiveness, lifecycle cost estimates, and a geospatial key linking project rows to shapefiles or other mapping files for spatial analysis.

Cal Advocates said the change would give the Commission and parties a consistent way to compare projects and programs across filings and to verify whether utilities are prioritizing work in the highest‑risk areas. Cal Advocates also demonstrated examples of heat maps and circuit overlays — including an example tied to outages during Enhanced Power Line Safety Settings (EPSS) activity and an overlay using PG&E’s WDRM version 3 wildfire risk layer — to show how mapping could…