Quantifying the Economic Value of Active Grid Response in High Fire-Risk Areas
with Jessie Calderon
View and download working paper (January 2026)
Abstract
Electric utilities are increasingly deploying active grid response technologies to mitigate wildfire risk and improve reliability. This study presents the first empirical evaluation of an active grid response platform, Gridware's Gridscope technology, analyzing its effectiveness across ignition prevention and outage reductions. Using four years of high-resolution ignition, outage, and deployment data (2022-2025) from Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), we use a differences-in-differences methodology to estimate the impacts of Gridscope. We find that Gridscope installations are associated with a 48% reduction in powerline ignitions during fast-trip safety settings enablement. We find that Gridscope installations cause a median 16% reduction in customer average interruption duration index (CAIDI) per circuit protection zone (CPZ) and a larger 24% reduction in CAIDI on CPZs with more frequent outages. Our cost-benefit analysis follows California regulatory frameworks, combining our empirical measures of effectiveness with modeled avoided wildfire damages, reliability impacts, and costs. We benchmark Gridscope against alternative grid hardening strategies across four mitigation design scenarios spanning PG&E’s highest risk distribution circuits. Undergrounding provides the greatest risk reduction and achieves a benefit-cost ratio of 1.4. Combining active grid response with covered conductor delivers a benefit-cost ratio of 2.6 with nearly comparable risk reduction to undergrounding. A scenario that excludes grid hardening altogether and mixes active grid response with operational strategies produces the highest benefit-cost ratio of 3.3. This research offers utilities and regulators empirical evidence on the economic value of active grid response technologies like Gridscope for wildfire mitigation, contributing to evidence-based decision-making for climate adaptation investments in the electric power sector. We caution that our choice of scenarios are illustrative and in practice utilities will deploy mixes of each strategy.
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The Reliability Costs of Wildfire Risk Management in the Electricity Sector
with Duncan Callaway and Meredith Fowlie
In progress. Expected working paper in Spring 2026.