Why This Utility Shut Off Power Before Disaster Hit

**Matt Chester** (0:00)
When you look at catastrophic power line fires, what they have in common is it's not just windy, it's unusually windy for that given location where that ignition occurred. That's where utilities are taking action that includes public safety power shutoffs. Obviously, you're bringing a lot of data into these decisions, but at the same time, it's such a human decision to finally make that call.

**Wade Ward** (0:20)
Any near-eruption of power is not what we want to do, but we also understand the responsibility of not starting a fire and the catastrophic effects that come with that.

**Matt Chester** (0:29)
Are there organizational muscles that that helps build that can apply to the PSPS? We understand the problem better than we ever have before. There's a blueprint now, and there's tools and data available to support that blueprint, to support those plans.
In April, Arizona Public Service executed its first ever public safety power shutoff. How did it get there, and what can we all learn from the decision calculus required to turn off the power? We'll find out today on Power Perspectives. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Matt Chester, and we're about to get a front row seat to what really happens when the going gets tough at a utility.
APS's first ever PSPS was a fast moving, high stakes event, and one that was guided by data, weather modeling, and strong utility judgment. Today, we'll hear from APS and their partners at TechnoSylva about how the decision came together, the tools used to build confidence to make such a major call, and what utilities can learn from the first Arizona PSPS as wildfire risk and operational complexity continue to rise. And a quick note that this episode is brought to you by our partners at TechnoSylva, so be sure to stick around to hear more about their exceptional work a little bit later on. And I'm thrilled to welcome our guests, Wade Ward, Manager of Wildfire Mitigation at Arizona Public Service, and Steve Vanderburgh, Vice President of Weather and Risk Solutions at TechnoSylva. Thank you for joining us today, guys. Thanks for having us. Of course. And I get your titles out there, but I'd love you to introduce yourselves a little bit more. What are your roles and responsibilities and how do you two work together? Yeah, I think before I jump into my role at TechnoSylva, I think maybe providing a little bit of my background is helpful here because I'm a meteorologist by training and actually started my career in the National Weather Service. So I spent 10 years in the federal government forecasting the weather, and during that time, particularly when I was in San Diego, I managed the local fire weather program. What that means is we're all familiar with red flag warnings, when those get issued when it gets windy and dry.
That was the program that I managed for portions of Southern California early in my career. Then after the 2007 wildfires in San Diego, several of which were attributed to power lines, I left the weather service and went to San Diego Gas and Electric, and was part of that initial early group of folks building a wildfire mitigation program for the utility. I was there for 10 years and that's where we pioneered a lot of the work that you're seeing implemented across utilities all over the nation today around situational awareness, weather and wildfire modeling, operational activities, including what we're talking about today, PSPS. Then I went to Pacific Corps after the Labor Day 2020 fires in the Pacific Northwest, spent three years there helping to build a program there as well before coming to TechnoSylva about two and a half years ago. Now I bring both that agency perspective, that utility experience, and then just the whole history of wildfire mitigation to TechnoSylva to help inform where our weather and risk products go. How do we improve those to further our mission, to help utilities mitigate the risk of wildfire? And I also help with things like innovation. Where do we focus? Where's the priority? And that's a lot of what I do now. And then a lot of one-on-one engagement with our customers. I mean, that's been central to TechnoSylva since the very beginning is we view our customers as partners and vice versa.
So I spent a lot of time on the road meeting with customers, working through their problems, helping with ideation, things of that nature.

**Wade Ward** (4:22)
Yeah. So again, my name is Wade Ward. I'm the manager of wildfire mitigation and fire science at Arizona Public Service. We serve the larger part of the state. We're the largest utility in Arizona.
We have the largest footprint on publicly managed lands, which is something interesting, especially for folks outside of California. I started in fire service. I spent a full career in the fire service, most of it in wildland and structure firefighting. Spent a lot of time on incident management teams, and oddly enough got introduced to the utility space as a liaison to Arizona Public Service on the slide fire in 2015, early 2015 during that time. And a year from that time later, I came to work for Arizona Public Service and I've been here for a little over 11 years. And I manage both the operations side as well as now the new and evolving data analytics and meteorology. So I was that person that didn't know a lot, but I did know that I needed a meteorologist. And shortly after I hired my first, I asked for three more.