Last Energy and Natural Resource Committee Hearing of 2019 Explores Grid Resilience to Wildfire

Photo credit: Curtis Gregory Perry

The last Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing of 2019 focused on one of the most pressing environmental challenges facing the American West: The impacts of wildfire on electric grid reliability.

As Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski observed in her opening remarks, increasing wildfire frequency, duration, and intensity in California has led to dramatic action to lower chances of ignition. State utilities are now granted greater authority to de-energize power lines—thereby causing blackouts for large portions of their customers—during extreme weather conditions such as high winds and intense heat. Such blackouts caused 3 million Californians to lose electricity in the summer of 2019.

As the state’s forests wither under drought, invasive insects, and encroaching development, extreme wildfire mitigation measures such as blackouts will become more common. The hearing’s witnesses made recommendations for the federal government to build resilience in the electric grid to both limit the number of ignitions caused by power lines and reduce the number of preventative blackouts in California and similarly affected states throughout the country.

Expert witnesses broadly approved of legislation passed in 2018 that ended the practice of “fire borrowing” (where the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) would raid other sources of funding for general park maintenance to fight wildfires) and updated rules utilities follow for accessing power lines and other infrastructure that crosses federal lands. The recently-passed National Defense Authorization Act was also praised for wildfire-related provisions that include using unmanned aerial technology, like drones, to detect wildfires at ignition.

Speakers noted that while the new legislation is helpful, getting approval from federal offices to remove hazardous vegetation near power lines on federal lands is still sometimes difficult—federal offices sometimes respond slowly to requests and responses can vary between local offices. While USFS has issued proposed rules to update their response practices in accordance with the new law, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) so far has not.

Further recommendations from the witnesses include:

• Authorizing regional maintenance plans to establish clear templates for federal land agencies and streamline approval processes.
• Categorical exclusions from National Environmental Policy Act protocols for certain routine work to enhance response time to hazards.
• Protect energy affordability to low-income customers impacted by rising utility costs from wildfires. One speaker suggested modeling a program after the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
• Continued forest management and fire suppression funding.
• Enable the Department of Defense to share satellite data on wildfire detection with forest management agencies. The DoD’s satellites can detect wildfires as small as 100 square feet. Congress should encourage the DoD to share fire outbreak information with the USFS and BLM in order to improve response time to wildfires.
• Incorporate climate resilience in future federal spending and planning decisions to maximize infrastructure lifespans.
• Use enhanced digital technologies to detect power line failures or weaknesses as soon as they happen, creating more “proactive” than “reactive” energy infrastructure.

Watch the hearing and read expert witness statements here.

 

Author: Amber Todoroff