Beyond PSPS: PG&E’s Wildfire Journey

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
As a professional involved in electricity delivery, the T&D World Podcast and tdworld.com is your definitive source for breaking news, industry updates, and more. We've got you covered from transmission to distribution and everything that affects the power grid. And now, on to today's episode.

**Jeff Postelwait** (0:22)
Hello, and welcome to T&D World Live Podcast. I'm Jeff Postelwait, Managing Editor for T&D World.
And the subject we have today here is wildfires. We just wrapped up doing our wildfire issue at T&D World. But as I was just saying before the recording, it's a topic that never really stops for people, for utilities, they're working around the clock and around the calendar year. So today we have Andy Abranches, who is VP of Wildfire Mitigation for Pacific Gas & Electric. Welcome to you, Andy.

**Andy Abranches** (0:54)
Hey, thank you, Jeff. Thank you for helping me on this podcast.

**Jeff Postelwait** (0:57)
Sure, no problem. Really appreciate a representative from a utility with as much going on as PG&E.
So I guess I'll just jump right in. About PSPS, one of the top goals for many utilities with regard to wildfire mitigation is how to make sure that public service power shutdowns are a last resort. So could you tell us how or whether PG&E has been successful in the past year at reducing the number of PSPSes or limiting their impact on customers?

**Andy Abranches** (1:32)
Yeah, I think the largest PSPS event that PG&E took was in 2019 And that was very early in our journey on PSPS. We had started getting our feet wet doing it in 2018 And then when the weather hit in 2019, we were scrambling, but we were committed to making things safe for our customers and making sure that a PSPS event did not result in a, I mean, the wind that happened did not result in a catastrophic fire.
And we were successful, but that PSPS event in 2019 took out almost a million customers across our service territory. And so, from that, there were a lot of learnings. And we've had the benefit of a steady improvement in the program.
Effectively, last year in 2025, we only de-energized, impacted basically around 17,000 customers, between 17,000 to 18,000 customers last year. And the prior year in 2024, it was closer in the range of 50,000 customers. Which really begs the question in terms of, you know, have we reduced the number of PSPS events? The real answer to the question is, the real answer is, we don't know simply because when you think of it from a PSPS event, it's really driven by what are the weather conditions that will manifest itself. So the way we like to think about it is, we are ready with regards to that. What we have done on the system is sectionalize. We've sectionalized it sufficiently so that when we do need to take PSPS, it's very focused on where the need is needed. I think in that regard, we've made some big strides.
To put it in context, basically if I take the 2024 data, and I compare it relative to what we landed up doing in the past, by sectionalizing alone, we've mitigated about 450,000 customers because we did sectionalizing work over the multitude of years prior to 2024 That gives you the best available measure for the sectionalizing work. There's also massive advances that have happened just on the weather forecasting. So trying to be a lot more precise, putting AI capabilities onto our weather stations. So we have a look ahead so we know when the weather has passed, when the weather is forecasted to have passed, so that we can recover from that as quickly as possible. So the recovery is just as important to us in that.

**Jeff Postelwait** (4:23)
Right. I do want to get into more on the AI aspect and the weather stations.
But wildfires being a huge issue for customers, but electricity bills are too. I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how PG&E is working with regulators and policy makers and others on making power grids more wildfire safe, but still delivering affordable electricity.

**Andy Abranches** (4:50)
Yes. I mean, there's no question that us responding to the modifier challenge, right, has required us to spend a fair amount of dollars on just redoing the system radically. I want to say upfront, I think customers benefit from that in a massive way.
If you look at the data from 2023, 2024, and 2025, we have not had a significant fire in PG&E service territory. Now, our work is never done and it requires vigilance. But I think the disruption from a large scale fire is extremely, extremely challenging for a community and for the surrounding regions. I think we can see the impact that's happening down in LA as a result of the Eaton and Palisades in early 2025