With the 2026 wildfire season just around the corner, utilities are facing major challenges and pressure to harden their systems against Mother Nature and ensure their ratepayers are still getting the services they paid for. A new report has taken the pulse of wildfire planning in the U.S. and laid out what a successful program looks like.
Wildfire Technology Landscape: A Framework for U.S. Utilities, a new whitepaper produced by Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA), Rhizome, and a few other stakeholders leading the charge on wildfire mitigation for utilities, outlines the six-stage framework SEPA developed to map utility wildfire actions from pre-season mitigation through post-event recovery, the technologies that support each stage, real-world utility programs and outcomes, the state legislative and regulatory landscape, and the investment justification frameworks that make technology decisions defensible.
To produce the whitepaper, SEPA convened a sample of five technology partners (Overstory, eSmart Systems, Technosylva, Pano AI, and Rhizome) and engaged more than 20 utility and regulatory advisors.
The whitepaper argues that across the power sector, leading utilities have embedded wildfire technology into their capital planning, operations, vegetation management, and incident response. However, SEPA notes that even the “most mature” programs can face ongoing integration challenges as the tech market evolves and wildfire risk expands into regions where utilities have never had to plan for it.
Full service territory deployment can yield better data, decisions, and evidence, the whitepaper argues, as a full service territory dataset can give regulators, insurers, and credit agencies the evidentiary record they need. The accuracy, accessibility, and connectivity of that data is also crucial, SEPA added. Geographic information system (GIS) coordinate accuracy, current asset records, and years of outage history are the “minimum inputs” for wildfire risk modeling, and utilities that utilize information technology (IT) and GIS teams before deployment are consistently outperforming those that don’t, SEPA said.
Utilities that integrate their technology streams will have a clearer picture of their operations. SEPA argues that the greatest value comes from “turning individual layers into shared enterprise risk intelligence,” as utilities can connect fire behavior models, asset condition intelligence, vegetation analytics, detection networks, and capital optimization platforms to existing outage management systems (OMS), GIS, asset management, and public safety power shutoff (PSPS) workflows.
Finally, the whitepaper notes that the majority of wildfire mitigation investment is still going toward vegetation management and infrastructure hardening, and “for good reason.” These are field-proven tactics that aren’t going away soon. However, utilities are beginning to direct a small but growing portion of funds toward technologies that help them determine where to harden the grid, what projects to prioritize, and where the risk is the highest.
Read the full report here.
At the DTECH Reliability & Resiliency event, taking place this August in Chicago, attendees will have the opportunity to join the Wildfire & Weather Emergency Response Summit, which is designed to equip utility leaders, engineers, and planners with the practical, multi-faceted look necessary to effectively analyze, mitigate, and manage the growing threat of wildfires, integrating strategy, technology, and prudent investment. Attendees will hear from AEP Texas, PNM, Xcel Energy, 4Liberty, eSmart Systems, Buzz Solutions, and more to learn about the latest moves and trends in the wildfire prevention, detection, and resiliency space.
DTECH Reliability & Resiliency is a two-day, solutions‑focused conference where utility executives, engineers, regulators, policymakers, and technology providers come together to address these challenges head‑on. Through utility‑led case studies, closed‑door roundtables, and interactive workshops, the program tackles real‑world issues including wildfire and hurricane preparedness, storm restoration, DER integration, and cybersecurity.
