A severe winter snow drought has left snowpack levels far below normal across the American West in 2026. Without a slow-melting blanket of snow to keep the soil and forests moist, alpine vegetation is drying into a tinderbox earlier than normal and ramping up the fire risk.
The historic dryness means electric utilities are facing a dilemma: how to deliver power through dry, windy regions without accidentally starting a catastrophic fire.
To cope, many utilities are turning to a controversial method pioneered in California: the public safety power shut-off – better known as a preemptive blackout. Imagine your power provider deliberately cutting electricity to your entire neighborhood for hours to days, not because a storm hit or a wire broke, but because the weather forecast is hot, dry and windy. This preventive darkness is fast becoming the new normal for millions of residents in the West.
As an energy systems researcher living in the West, I study how our electric grid interacts with these escalating climate risks. I believe utilities have better options that boost fire safety quickly while avoiding the drastic move of shutting off the power or investing in expensive alternatives, such as underground power lines or microgrids.
Billion-dollar spark: Why the West is going dark
To understand why a utility would willingly turn off its own product, you have to look at how the Western grid was built.
Most rural power lines consist of bare, uninsulated aluminum wires strung across thousands of miles of wooden poles, often through rugged forests. If those wires accidentally touch one another or trees or the ground, they can short-circuit, sending off sparks that can start fires.
This system, once considered the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century, has been responsible for some of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history.
In California, electricity infrastructure has ignited eight of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires. The legal and financial fallout can be devastating. In 2019, Pacific Gas & Electric was forced into bankruptcy due to an estimated US$30 billion in wildfire liabilities stemming from equipment-caused blazes, including the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed much of the town of Paradise. Because utilities are regulated monopolies, they can pass these massive liability costs to their customers over time.
California utilities have been using preemptive outages for several years to avoid causing more fires on hot, dry, windy days. Today, that strategy has spread beyond the state. According to the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, the independent grid reliability authority for the West, 24 western power entities had used preemptive shut-offs by 2026.
Colorado’s Xcel Energy implemented its first major preemptive blackout in 2025. Some of these outages have left communities without power for up to five days.
Fortunately, keeping communities safe does not have to mean leaving them in the dark. There are ways utilities can modernize electric system infrastructure quickly that lower the fire risk and keep the power flowing.
Solution 1: Covered conductors
The quickest, most cost-effective physical fix is to use covered conductors. Think of the electrical cords in your house. If you touched the bare copper wire inside, it would spark. But you don’t get shocked by household cords because they are wrapped in plastic insulation.
Utilities like Southern California Edison are actively wrapping their high-risk mountain wires in heavy, weather-resistant polymer insulation. By the end of 2025, SCE had installed over 700 circuit miles (1,126 kilometers) of this insulated “tree wire” in high-fire districts over the span of about a year and committed to modify an additional 1,481 miles (2,383 kilometers) by 2028.
If a severe windstorm blows a heavy pine branch directly onto an insulated line, it simply rests against the wire without sparking. It is a highly effective middle-ground fix that’s significantly less expensive than burying transmission lines in mountain forests, and it can be deployed rapidly across thousands of miles.
2. ‘Fast-trip’ settings and topology optimization
Another option is to change how the electricity behaves inside the power line using automated technology.
Traditionally, if a tree branch touched a power line, the system would try to push electricity through the line anyway, causing repeated sparking. Today, utilities are deploying “fast-trip” settings on their circuit breakers.
Think of these like the ultra-sensitive circuit breakers in your home. The microsecond a branch bumps an outdoor line, these smart systems detect the disruption and cut the power to that specific wire before a spark can even form. This allows operators to isolate a single high-risk area rather than shutting down power to an entire county.
Topology optimization is another promising operations technique. It acts like Google Maps for the electric grid. Instead of shutting power down when one line is facing high risks, advanced software attempts to safely route electricity around the danger zone using neighboring, lower-risk lines.
By dynamically changing the pathway of the power, utilities can drastically reduce the electrical load and heat on vulnerable lines without cutting power.
Solution 3: AI and real-time smart sensors
Advanced computer software and artificial intelligence are also helping utilities act with surgical precision.
In the past, if a utility feared a windstorm could spark a fire, it had to shut off power to a large region because it lacked localized data. Today, utilities are deploying smart sensors called dynamic line rating that are installed directly onto power lines. These sensors act like digital stethoscopes, measuring real-time wire temperature, wind speed and line sag.
When combined with panoramic, AI-powered camera networks, the grid gains eyes. Xcel Energy in Colorado has deployed 81 of these cameras. Instead of executing a sweeping blackout, operators can use these cameras and automated smart switches to isolate the high-risk span in a windy canyon while keeping the lights safely on for the surrounding town.
The era of risk-aware grid design
The future of Western energy relies on moving away from static, 20th-century safety manuals and toward a practice called risk-aware dispatching.
In simple terms, this means treating the power grid like a living, breathing weather map. On a calm day, electricity is routed along the cheapest path. But when fire conditions spike, AI algorithms will automatically recalculate the region’s electricity flow, diverting power away from fragile forest lines and routing it through safer plains or underground urban corridors.
The era of cheap, unmonitored overhead power lines is over. To adapt to a changing climate, I believe the grid must evolve from a passive network of copper, aluminum and wood into a smart, dynamic machine. By combining insulated wires, targeted undergrounding of power lines, and real-time sensor data, utilities can avoid sparking devastating fires without resorting to frequent blackouts.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Jasmine Garland, University of Colorado Boulder
Read more:
- How to protect your home from wildfires – advice from fire prevention experts on creating defensible space
- Shutting off power to reduce wildfire risk on windy days isn’t a simple decision – an energy expert explains the trade‑offs electric utilities face
- The US is spending billions to reduce forest fire risks – we mapped the hot spots where treatment offers the biggest payoff for people and climate
Jasmine Garland receives funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Energy.
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