PG&E’s Continuous Monitoring Center — Can it Prevent Wildfire?

At the start of Wildfire Awareness Month (isn’t that something we should be aware of every month?) PG&E has introduced new technology into its wildfire prevention efforts. The company says its new Continuous Monitoring Center will assist in finding problems on the power grid.

PG&E vice president of wildfire mitigation, Andrew Abranches notes the new Continuous Monitoring Center will look for sparks, outages and ignition and other problems on the power grid before they become a dangerous wildfire.

“We can intervene early, prevent outages, prevent an ignition, and fundamentally bring the cost of operations down, make it more affordable for providing wildfire protection,” Abranches said.

Craig Kurtz is PG&E’s senior director for continuous monitoring added the system is built on equipment that already exists.

“It's using sensors in a way in our existing equipment that creates additional value on top of what they were put there to do originally,” Kurtz said and noted when a sensor senses something wrong, a crew is sent out to investigate. “All of these things give us signs and signals that there may be something impacting the grid or that an asset may be in distress.”

When a very dangerous situation is caught early, it’s a good catch.

“Every time we have these good catches, it's like a really big win for this team," Kurtz said. "We avoided an unplanned outage, so we didn't have a service interruption with our customers and we didn't have a potential ignition event.”

He noted since 2024 the company has recorded 1,484 good catches, and so far in 2025 the Continuous Monitoring Center has found 17 potential ignitions in high-risk areas. Kurtz said that has avoided 12 million minutes of unplanned outages and reduced emergency outage response times by more than 2,620 hours.

Overall, it has saved the company $6 million in operational costs.

Source link: Fox 26 News — https://bit.ly/4n8l7iG