Who is to blame for utility caused fires? Structural determinants of wildfire mitigation plan adoption

• In Event: Mitigating Wildfire Risk in the Wildland Urban Interface

Abstract

Introduction/Background: Electric utility linked fire risk is an increasing challenge facing state governments and utilities in an arid and electrified U.S. West. Wildfire mitigation plans provide a path for utilities to communicate and begin to address wildfire risk of electric service provision. Utilities face different regulatory and ownership structures that potentially structure the choice to plan. Some states mandate plans while others offer incentives. Municipally owned utilities commonly have sovereign immunity to liability risks, while an investor owned utility faces no such protections. Moreover, many utilities cross state boundaries, meaning their plans and procedures must respond to multiple regulatory systems. 

Purpose/Research Question: Our project focuses on three questions: 1. What incentives are created by state regulatory and/or liability policies across different utility ownership categories? 2. How have these structures changed over the 2018-2025 period? 3. How does the multi-level interaction of state and utility-level structures predict the adoption of wildfire mitigation plans?

Methods: We identify adoption of plans in the 2018-2025 period across 371 utilities in the Western U.S. For each utility we utilize Energy Information Administration (EIA) descriptors of utility characteristics and service territories to develop a dataset of plan adoption across utility characteristics. We then develop a second level of analysis, state legislation and public utility commission rules on vegetation management relevant to utilities in each state. At the state level we evaluate liability, immunity, and legislative mandates. We then use a multilevel regression model to evaluate how state regulatory and utility ownership and service characteristics predict adoption of plans over the study period.

Results/Findings: We find state liability limits and mandates both promote adoption of mitigation plans, but do so unequally across utility types. Cooperative utilities, for example, respond to liability waivers but otherwise adopt plans at lower rates than investor-owned utilities. Meanwhile, municipal/and or public utility adoption is conditioned on legislative waivers of sovereign immunity and/or state-level mandates. Finally, because utilities are not nested neatly within states but operate across state boundaries, we find spillover of plan adoption based on shared service territories across state boundaries. 

Conclusion/Implications:  The results suggest that state regulation can create incentives for municipal adoption of wildfire plans. However, without regulatory action or modifications to liability, formal planning may be largely limited to investor-owned and cooperative electric providers. Our results also indicate that the misalignment between utility service areas and state boundaries create spillover, and that state comparisons of policies may obscure utility level actions.

Author

• Ryan P Scott, Colorado State University
  Presenting Author