This paper examines the use of risk models to predict the timing and location of wildfires caused by electricity infrastructure. Our data include historical ignition and wire-down points triggered by grid infrastructure collected between 2015 to 2019 in Pacific Gas & Electricity territory along with various weather, vegetation, and very high resolution data on grid infrastructure including location, age, materials. With these data we explore a range of machine learning methods and strategies to manage training data imbalance. The best area under the receiver operating characteristic we obtain is 0.776 for distribution feeder ignitions and 0.824 for transmission line wire-down events, both using the histogram-based gradient boosting tree algorithm (HGB) with under-sampling. We then use these models to identify which information provides the most predictive value. After line length, we find that weather and vegetation features dominate the list of top important features for ignition or wire-down risk. Distribution ignition models show more dependence on slow-varying vegetation variables such as burn index, energy release content, and tree height, whereas transmission wire-down models rely more on primary weather variables such as wind speed and precipitation. These results point to the importance of improved vegetation modeling for feeder ignition risk models, and improved weather forecasting for transmission wire-down models. We observe that infrastructure features make small but meaningful improvements to risk model predictive power.

The utility is testing artificial intelligence software in some of its ALERTWildfire cameras set up around the state. "This is all about improving …

Lightning was a factor in many of these fires. But past blazes, including the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, Calif., were started by faulty transmission equipment. In that case, a worn piece of metal that holds power lines, known as a C-hook, broke and dropped a high-voltage electric line that ignited that fire. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. In June, PG&E Corp., parent company of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for its role in sparking that fire.

Based on the last two wildfire seasons, including 2018 when an entire California town was destroyed, utilities blamed for recent wildfires need all the help they can get maintaining aging grids. AI technologies may provide new monitoring tools. Paradise, Calif., population of about 27,000, was destroyed by the Camp Fire. The 2018 inferno claimed at least 84 victims. In June, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) was ordered to pay a $3.5 million fine for causing the Camp Fire.

To gauge the complexity of the juggling act utility firms must perform to stay in business, consider two statistics. In the four years to 2018, the number of Britons who switched their energy supplier almost doubled to 5.9 million; at the same time, the contribution of renewables to energy firms' output mix grew from about 13% to just shy of 20%. One represents a fundamental change in consumer expectations of the service they receive while the other highlights the political and environmental pressures being brought to bear on suppliers' operations. To the list of challenges that are adding to the pressures under which utilities operate, add the tightening – and disparate – the grip of regulators, the fracturing of transmission networks and the increasing influence of activist investors. Managing these changing times can be incredibly challenging for established utilities, especially at a time when technology is enabling venture-backed start-ups to move into niche segments of their operations.

A satellite image of Alaska captured in August 2005 shows the extent of smoke coverage from wildfires in the state's boreal forests. The blazes are likely to become large in exceptionally hot and dry conditions and when there's a high percentage of black spruce trees in the affected areas – key factors in a new predictive model developed by UCI scientists. An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine has developed a new technique for predicting the final size of a wildfire from the moment of ignition. Built around a machine learning algorithm, the model can help in forecasting whether a blaze is going to be small, medium or large by the time it has run its course – knowledge useful to those in charge of allocating scarce firefighting resources. The researchers' work is highlighted in a study published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

Often construction CIOs and executives are leery of "shiny" toys that offer glitz, glam, and a lot of hype, but little tangible benefits and ROI (return on investment). Do drones fall in this category, or are they beginning to offer true benefits to construction beyond the cool factor? Certainly, the forecast for commercial-drones market is on the rise, with many analysts predicting further growth. Technavio, for instance, predicts the global commercial drones market is anticipated to grow 36% between 2018 and 2022. Reasons for this include increased applicability of commercial drones in various verticals and access to better data insights using commercial drones.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. He's the former Enron chief executive whose scheming helped bankrupt PG&E during the California energy crisis. On Friday, Skilling was released from federal custody after serving 12 years in prison for multiple counts of securities fraud, conspiracy and other crimes. Home prices: The latest Case-Shiller home price index comes out Tuesday. In November, seasonally adjusted home prices for the benchmark 20-city index were up 0.3% month over month.

Utilities house enormous datasets that defy traditional analysis, for which machine-learning could be of great benefit. When machine-learning is applied to IoT data, utility companies are able to realise the next generation power grid that can eventually handle billions of endpoints on utility networks autonomously. Pacific Gas and Electric's (PG&E) emerging technologies leader Tom Martin and Paul Doherty, corporate relations, discuss how machine learning and data science is being leveraged for asset maintenance and the integration of distributed energy resources (DER). MSEI: What does machine-learning mean to PG&E? What is your definition of machine-learning? TM: Machine-learning at PG&E is the ability to use analytics to drive optimisation in our operations.