With wildfires raging across the Bay Area, PG&E hopes artificial intelligence will give officials a way of staying ahead of them and the risk they pose to the power grid.
By adding AI to PG&E's more than 1,500 weather stations and investment in wildlife cameras the company said they can better understand fire and outage risks.
“In fire events, or potential fire events we are monitoring the potential outages that could result, the locations we may need to proactively shut of the power, we’re also moving around crews to make sure we can restore power as quickly as possible as soon as the weather is all clear,” said Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s director of meteorology and fire science.
Strenfel said as climate change becomes a larger changing factor it makes the job more challenging.
“We've definitely seen and felt the effects of climate change already and we know those effects are only going to accelerate into the future,” he said. “I think the solution from the utility perspective is more situational awareness, grid hardening and under grounding where the risk is going to increase and so we’re looking at those climate models to where the fire risk is going to increase and taking the necessary action but I think a lot of what we’re doing here in this center to be more situationally aware is definitely going to address some of the problem but not all of it.”
Going forward, the company has partnered with San Jose Meteorology to collaborate on fire weather risk models. PG&E has also made wind, humidity and fire areas detected by satellite available to the public on its website.
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