Jeff Pauska is vice president of product management for IFS Copperleaf.
As climate patterns shift, extended fire seasons and expanding high-risk zones have exponentially increased the social, financial and regulatory consequences of wildfire events. With lives and often billions of dollars at stake, state and provincial regulators are putting mounting pressure on electric utilities to make risk-based investment decisions to halt the damage. Utilities must act with speed, transparency and unprecedented accuracy.
Ultimately, modern wildfire mitigation for North American utilities is a profound capital allocation challenge amid the risk of extreme threat uncertainty. Traditional approaches to mitigate the effects of wildfire disruption using basic inspection cycles and static maintenance schedules are no match for the devastation that wildfires cause.
Wildfire mitigation has evolved into a highly complex, capital-intensive investment decision that must be rigorously defensible to regulatory commissions and stakeholders at every level — not to mention make financial sense for the utility.
North American utilities are forced to choose between a diverse array of mitigation options, depending on regional priorities and localized threats. These range from heavy capital physical upgrades, such as system-wide undergrounding and installing covered conductors, to disruptive operational interventions, such as Public Safety Power Shutoffs.
Decisions must be made and justified to regulators, stakeholders and the public in general.
In California, for example, as part of the utility’s mitigation plan, Pacific Gas and Electric intends to underground 1,900 miles of lines by 2027 and thousands more miles from 2028-2037. Other fire mitigation efforts include clearing 4.4 million trees, as well as installing more than 1,600 weather stations and 700+ high-definition cameras with AI capability.
Meanwhile, Hawaiian Electric is projecting nearly $500 million in wildfire mitigation spending over the next three years after state regulators approved its 2025–2027 wildfire mitigation plan. Hawaiian Electric projects about $60 million to install covered conductors on roughly 56 miles of overhead lines on Oʻahu, Maui and Hawaiʻi Island by the end of 2027, at an average cost of about $1.07 million per mile.
The primary hurdle for utility leaders is not simply identifying where the highest ignition risk lies, but determining exactly how to allocate limited capital across these competing priorities to minimize total enterprise exposure. And of course, every intervention strategy carries vastly different implications for risk reduction, cost, deployment speed and long-term grid performance.
But critical risk, asset and financial data often remain fragmented across different departments, severely limiting a utility's visibility into where a specific investment will actually reduce the most risk.
Digital tools tackle wildfire risk
It’s all about being able to understand risk and the digital tools are there to help and guide leaders to ensure they avoid exposing their organizations to unacceptable risks. It requires a shift toward a portfolio-based planning approach, using asset investment planning tools that help organizations move away from evaluating mitigation on an isolated, single-project basis and toward comprehensive, asset-wide optimization.
Instead of subjectively asking which individual line needs to be hardened first, all portfolio assets and mitigation options are assessed together so the investments delivering the greatest tangible risk reduction become mathematically clear.
Here are key areas where asset investment planning tools are helping utilities fight back against wildfire threats:
Turning wildfire risk data into investment plans. Utilities possess valuable wildfire risk data, but they often struggle to convert that intelligence into defensible, investment-grade decisions. They face the complex challenge of determining exactly where ignition risks are highest, understanding the financial and safety consequences, and deciding how to allocate limited capital for maximum impact.
Asset investment planning tools resolve this by transforming vendor-agnostic risk data into a financially quantified expected loss. By integrating this intelligence with asset attributes, intervention costs and capital constraints, the platform optimizes investment decisions to deliver the greatest risk reduction per dollar spent, resulting in a transparent, regulator-ready mitigation program.
Maximizing risk reduction. To achieve the highest return on investment, utilities must navigate an overwhelming number of variables, balancing numerous intervention options against strict financial and regulatory constraints. Asset investment planning tools utilize an advanced optimization engine that carefully evaluates thousands of potential intervention combinations across different assets, budget scenarios and time horizons. This deep analytical capability generates a transparent, portfolio-level plan designed to explicitly maximize risk reduction while aligning with the utility's financial limits.
Quantifying the cost of action and inaction. Wildfire mitigation decisions are incredibly complex because they extend far beyond standard physical asset upgrades. A Public Safety Power Shutoff, for instance, carries heavy financial, reputational and community impacts that must be weighed directly alongside infrastructure investments. Asset investment planning software enables utilities to carefully evaluate these complex trade-offs between heavy, capital-intensive mitigation strategies and immediate operational interventions, allowing organizations to mathematically quantify both the true cost of taking action and the cost of doing nothing.
Putting risk reduction and investment impact on the map. Utilities need an effective way to convey complex asset-level risks and investment impacts to a diverse group of stakeholders who require clear geographic context to understand the data. With two-way mapping and spatial data analytics technology embedded in asset investment planning software, stakeholders are able to visually explore asset-level risks and the impacts of specific investments directly within their geographic context. This spatial visualization drastically strengthens communication and alignment across technical teams, executives, regulatory bodies and local communities.
A portfolio-based planning approach supports confident, defensible wildfire mitigation by evaluating every investment through a consistent, risk-driven framework so utilities can defend their decisions. Only then can they more confidently prioritize projects, justify expenditure and demonstrate that every investment contributes to reducing wildfire risk.
