California utilities try AI to combat costly wildfire liabilities

One company helps spot problematic trees; another suggests investments in safety.

- By LauREN ROSENTHAL AND JOE WERTZ

HOMES in Altadena lie in ruins after the Eaton fire. Southern California Edison is suspected of causing it.

(ROBERT GAUTHIER Los Angeles Times)

On the hunt for cheap and fast strategies to prevent deadly wildfires, utilities across the U.S. and Europe are contracting with a handful of artificial intelligence startups to map wildfire risk along thousands of miles of power lines, picking out individual trees to cut and poles to replace.

The most obvious way to prevent power equipment from sparking a blaze is to bury lines underground. But at a cost of upward of $3 million a mile, many investor-owned utilities are limiting themselves to just a few hundred miles of buried lines per year. That’s proved to be a major business opportunity for several tech companies that use machine learning to deliver custom recommendations for targeted, relatively low-cost fixes - including some that can be paid for from maintenance budgets.

Take Massachusetts-based Overstory, which analyzes high-definition satellite images to spot trees most likely to topple or drop a limb onto power distribution lines — those most in need of trimming. The company started out making tools to find and discourage deforestation, Chief Executive Fiona Spruill said. Overstory pivoted after a realization: “We could have a huge impact from a climate standpoint, in that we could help prevent wildfires,” she said. The company recently closed an oversubscribed Series B funding round that pulled in more than $43 million.

Overstory’s clients now include American Electric Power Co.’s Texas utility and California’s Pacific Gas & Electric Co. along with other major U.S. utilities, Spruill said. United Kingdom-based National Grid, meanwhile, has signed a deal with Rhizome, a San Francisco-based climate tech firm, for custom modeling to suggest investments in fire safety.