Vegetation Treatment Effecttiveness

Trees located along power line equipment and conductors pose an ignition threat when failure occurs and the failed tree creates an alternative pathway, called a fault, for electricity to travel through. This has the potential to cause a spark in the surrounding fuel and create a catastrophic wildfire.

Predictive tools, such as the PG&E’s Wildfire Distribution Risk Model and PG&E’s Wildfire Transmission Risk Model, serve to guide PG&E and partnered contractor work crews to locations where the wildfire risk is highest. The threat is then assessed and if observed, is mitigated through tree and branch removal.

This process is costly, however, and various problems may exacerbate the cost such as location accessibility, permitting and increased fuel costs. It is important to PG&E that customer money is spent wisely toward effective measures that prevent catastrophic wildfires.

The goal of this project is to build a tool that will assess a location specific measure of the effectiveness of these vegetation mitigations using the following data:

• Locations of completed tree work
• Locations of tree failures
• Locations of CPUC reportable ignitions
• Current estimated strike tree counts and associated remote sensing data representing tree height and distance from lines.