Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Wildfire Risk Tools topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
PNNL outlines wildfire risk‑tool workflow, free mitigation‑plan database and preemptive operations at advisory board workshop
Summary
At a Wildfire Safety Advisory Board workshop, PNNL presented tools and resources—including an open mitigation‑plan database with an AI query layer, a best‑practices report and a modeling workflow that translates landscape wildfire likelihood into asset impacts—to help publicly owned utilities plan and operate for wildfire risk.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers described a suite of wildfire risk tools and resources at a Wildfire Safety Advisory Board staff workshop, saying the tools aim to help publicly owned utilities and cooperatives turn landscape‑level wildfire likelihood into asset‑level impacts and operational decisions.
"When you truly put both of them together, that's when you can really, truly quantify risk," said Vishwas Talasazar, bulk energy systems team lead at PNNL, during a slide‑driven presentation to the board and participants. Talasazar framed the distinction between hazard likelihood and risk—explaining that many commonly used risk scores reflect likelihood only and that full quantification requires combining likelihood with vulnerability and consequence.
Talasazar walked through a modeling workflow that begins with geospatial wildfire likelihood (landscape indices such as those published by the National Interagency Fire Center) and then translates that likelihood into the probability that grid assets will lose function. For wildfires, he said, a single fragility curve is insufficient because multiple excitations (wind, humidity, temperature, ember exposure) influence outcomes; PNNL instead uses a fragility function framework to capture those interactions.
The presenter promoted an open, PNNL‑maintained wildfire mitigation plan database that currently includes "over 425 plans" from roughly 178 utilities and features an analysis tab that aggregates common mitigation strategies across plans. He said the database also includes an "AI wrapper" trained only on the mitigation plans in that collection to help users query plan content and that the resource has about 6,400 daily active users.
"It's free and open access," Talasazar said of the database, urging attendees to use the analysis and geographic map layers to compare strategies across regions. He encouraged participants to review PNNL's roughly 100‑page best practices report, which includes sections on description, application (transmission/distribution), risk mitigation benefits, implementation challenges, utility examples and future direction.
As a use case, Talasazar described how predictive likelihoods could inform preemptive operational choices. If a model predicts, for example, a 60% chance of a public safety power shutoff (PSPS) on a particular transmission line within two days, utilities could run topology optimization and production cost models to derate that line or redispatch generation ahead of a PSPS to reduce customer impacts—an approach he said involves tradeoffs such as higher short‑term generation costs.
Talasazar also summarized PNNL's utility technical assistance program for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), noting a phase 1 rollout last summer and plans for a phase 2 rollout this summer to provide direct support to utilities on these topics. He tied PNNL's work to recent federal activity, saying the report and resources were developed in response to a wildfire executive order and related federal coordination on wildfire risk reduction.
The workshop session concluded with the promise of a panel discussion (not covered in the provided transcript) and an open discussion period for participants to ask questions and comment on the presentations. No formal motions or votes were recorded in the provided transcript segments.
