Insights from the Wildfire & Weather Emergency Response Summit at DTECH Reliability & Resilience

We‘ve documented the extensive efforts that utilities are making when it comes to mitigating wildfire risks, all of which highlight the incredible pressure that teams and stakeholders are facing around improving grid resilience while simultaneously protecting customer affordability. The severity and frequency of recent weather-related incidents highlight the fact that conventional approaches to these sorts of challenges are no longer sufficient. Utilities of all sizes and types need to sort out which strategies and technologies best address these threats within their specific regional and organizational contexts, which was a central theme at the Wildfire & Resiliency Strategy Summit that took place during DTECH Reliability & Resiliency. Check out some of the speaker highlights below, all of which are set to serve as a primer to the Wildfire & Resiliency Strategy Summit at DTECH 2027. Understanding the Stakes Grace Zarzecki from LiveEO opened the Summit by outlining the necessity of cross-industry collaboration. She mentioned that the best preparation efforts are defined by context-driven strategies that can be tailored to specific regional characteristics that also incorporate broader sector trends, highlighting how utilities can learn more from one another than any other source. “We’re constantly fielding questions about peer strategies and best practices,” Zarzecki said. “It’s why we’re here, because we wanted to support a dedicated forum where these vital, peer-to-peer discussions can take place.” Those peer discussions started off with a Comprehensive Wildfire Resilience from the Frontlines panel, where industry leaders discussed how grid operators are transitioning from reactive emergency response to proactive, data-informed risk mitigation. Driven by changing environmental conditions, climate variability, and expanding development within the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), panelists outlined what’s now and what’s next when it comes to messaging and insights that are related to the core challenges. “Fire is a unique natural hazard in two distinct ways,” said Adi Ranade from Rhizome. “First, it’s a shared societal risk. Utility assets represent just one potential ignition source among extreme weather factors and regional building codes. Second, it carries existential financial exposure for utilities. Managing this challenge requires addressing every angle, from ignition prevention to impact reduction through targeted grid hardening.” By combining forecasting reports with localized data analytics, utilities can weigh ignition probabilities against downstream operational impacts. This data-driven approach enables the deployment of specific mitigation tactics that can be defined by utility teams, such as covered conductors, strategic undergrounding, and expanded situational awareness tools. With regulators in at least 15 states now mandating formal Wildfire Mitigation Plans (WMPs), such efforts have become even more critical. This sort of data can fuel reports and evaluations that utilities can use to justify capital expenditures and prioritize needed infrastructure upgrades. Scaling Visual AI for Asset Inspections & Mitigation Kaitlyn Albertoli of Buzz Solutions detailed how electric utilities like AEP Texas and Dominion Energy leverage visual AI platforms to automate asset inspections, accelerate wildfire mitigation, and bolster storm resilience. Managing over 44,000 miles of distribution lines in high-risk weather zones, AEP Texas uses AI-driven drone imagery, thermal data, and GIS integration to compress its inspection timeline from a five-year cycle to an annual cycle by 2027. “Instead of spending time on manual data analysis, field crews can shift their focus to where they need to prioritize,” Albertoli said. “The goal is to have humans focused on reviewing just the priority issues detected in those images.” Replacing manual image analysis with machine learning algorithms allows teams to rapidly inventory components, track defect trends, and keep GIS records current, freeing analysts and field crews to resolve high-priority hazards. From Risk Maps to Capital Plans Holly Eagleston of FireScape and Jeremy Tabet of Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) took to the stage to talk through and illustrate how asset-level analytics can transform wildfire modeling into actionable, budget-conscious capital plans. Eagleston has already outlined what it means to align wildfire mitigation with established utility operations and planning, but the Summit showcased what those details look like for PNM, which has leveraged FireScape to simulate fire-spread scenarios down to 100-meter line segments. The effort combines satellite fuel imagery, weather data, and equipment health metrics to calculate financial risk exposure. This granular approach enables optimization algorithms that prioritize high-impact mitigations while maximizing risk reduction per dollar spent, which is something that the team needs to consider in a big way. “We’d love to underground everything, but as a utility with heavy rate pressure, it’s not feasible,” Tabet said. “FireScape helps us find that middle ground between undergrounding everything and doing nothing, making sure that the money we’re spending is the most efficient way possible to reduce the maximum amount of risk.” Building Trust Through Crisis with Customers Paolo Paruccini from 4Liberty and Dave Bunge from ComEd outlined how modern utility emergency response requires shifting from a purely operational mindset to a transparent, customer-centric communication strategy. Real-time field feedback and direct engagement with communities help break down an “us versus them” dynamic during prolonged outages that can otherwise create issues long after power has been restored. “It doesn’t matter how great of a job we feel we’re doing based on metrics or internal perception,” said Bunge. “If our customers have a bad perception of us, none of the rest matters. Humanizing our response and telling our story is what changes the narrative.” Illustrating what that actually looked like, Bunge shared some of the social media posts the organization has made that are now part of their larger storm restoration efforts. Additionally, to better manage public expectations, ComEd overhauled traditional restoration timelines by moving away from delayed post-damage assessment estimates to instead issue restoration benchmarks within two hours of peak outages using historical data and predictive machine learning. Condition-Based Asset Management & Grid Resilience Further detailing why a layered defense for utility wildfire mitigation is so critical, Don McPhail from eSmart Systems detailed how AI-powered inspections can create a precise, component-level view of utility assets. Joining speakers from ComEd and Xcel Energy, he illustrated how utilities can direct capital directly where degraded hardware meets real-world hazards, which can turn an otherwise overwhelming pile of inspection data into an actionable plan. “The shift we need is simple to say but tough to do,” said McPhail. “It means moving away from the trap of doing more and instead doing what actually moves the needle. But you need the data, strategy, and confidence to back that choice up.” Panelists detailed what this sort of approach can mean during unprecedented weather events, such as ComEd’s record-breaking storm outages during the summer of 2026. It requires moving from traditional calendar-based maintenance to data-driven, condition-based asset management. Fusing aerial data with weather forecasting, and machine learning allows utilities to evaluate structural risks at the circuit and segment levels. Pre-stage field crews can then build and use digital twins to best utilize scarce field resources during an incident while simultaneously reducing outage durations. Smarter Vegetation Intelligence Eve Egdmann and Andreas Naujoks of LiveEO discussed how the expansion of wildfire threats beyond the Western United States requires a shift that isn’t just about taking what was being done in that region and applying elsewhere. Successful mitigation is about something that goes beyond the baseline on multiple levels. “Generic wildfire mitigation is no longer a strategy, it’s a vulnerability,” said Naujoks. “The future of grid protection demands hyper-local, intelligence-driven action.” Drawing from their recently completed Wildfire Frontiers Summit, they highlighted how utilities can harness span-level vegetation to define strategies that are incredibly specific. Integrating satellite-driven vegetation data with asset health metrics, local weather modeling, and multi-year capital allocation frameworks allows forestry teams to move beyond broad trimming schedules to instead target high-risk areas that best address relatively minor issues before they become costly problems. Designing an Integrated, Centralized Wildfire Management Organization Jason Hawkins from Dominion Energy and Mona Fazel from Danovo Energy Solutions detailed how Dominion aligns wildfire resilience across Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Facing rapid system growth that is being driven by industrial development and Northern Virginia’s expanding data center corridor, Dominion is focused on balancing their grid expansion efforts while simultaneously adapting to novel weather hazards across their entire service territory. While Fazel has previously outlined how utilities can embed continuous improvement into wildfire mitigation and resiliency programs, the event provided them with a platform to demonstrate what this process can actually look like. Dominion transitioned from siloed execution across distribution, transmission, and forestry teams to a unified enterprise framework that ensures clear accountability, which is a structural shift that Hawkins considers essential for managing non-traditional risks. “Even on the East Coast, you shouldn’t wait for a major event before developing a wildfire mitigation plan,” Hawkins said. “You need a systematic, centralized governance framework tailored to risks that were not historically an issue, which makes proactive planning all the more important.” Hawkins’ perspective underscores why resilience strategies need to align with both team-level execution and broader organizational goals. As wildfire risks expand and extreme weather events become increasingly complex, long-term success is directly connected to the breakdown of internal silos that will foster better collaboration across the entire energy ecosystem. The Wildfire & Resiliency Strategy Summit is set to support this need at an industry level, as it will serve as an essential gathering for utility executive leaders, emergency preparedness experts, grid operations teams, and regulatory partners. Click here to learn more about the event.