Wildfire is now an operational, financial, and reputational risk that compounds year over year. For electric utilities, the cost of inaction shows up in damaged assets, customer frustration, regulatory scrutiny, and higher financing costs. The solution isn’t more dashboards; rather it’s coordinated decisions grounded in defensible data.
Athena Intelligence’s Voice of the Acre® turns disaggregated environmental inputs into spatial intelligence your teams can act on. The result: a living wildfire risk plan that prioritizes where, when, and why to act, and proves the ROI.
Who “owns” the wildfire program? Everyone.
An effective program isn’t a silo. It’s a synchronized effort that uses the same data backbone across functions.
While most utilities start with a base plan, a Wildfire Mitigation Plan (WMP), as they focus on a goal of reducing the impact on their business and customers, their understanding increases. Before long, four different departments are called to work on different aspects of wildfire planning:
Vegetation Management: Sequence trims and removals by shifting corridor risk, taking into account for growth cycles, fire scars, terrain, and recent mitigations.
Operations: Adjust field work on high-risk days, pre-stage crews, and harden equipment in zones with the highest ignition and spread probability.
Finance & Regulatory: Quantify avoided losses and mitigation ROI to support cost recovery, rate cases, insurance negotiations and investor communications.
GIS & Planning: Translate geospatial risk into work packages, outage playbooks, and emergency protocols.
When these teams work from the same evidence, maps become mission plans, and “coordination” becomes muscle memory.
How leading utilities put this to work
Focus the field of view. Most engineers know the usual hotspots. Voice of the Acre® validates and refines those instincts with statistically derived profiles of the surrounding landscape (vegetation structure, topography, ignition history). Some zones drop out; new ones emerge. Priorities get sharper.
Prioritize by consequence, not proximity. Instead of ranking hazards only by distance to assets, the platform weighs likelihood and impact within the specific bioregion. That nuance changes the order of operations—and outcomes.
Operationalize on high-risk days. Vegetation cycles, maintenance schedules, and restoration strategies are built on risk-informed triggers. Crews know where to be, when to be there, and what success looks like.
Make PSPS decisions defensible. Shutoff calls are anchored in scientific models that balance safety with reliability. That reduces unnecessary disruptions and strengthens trust with customers, regulators, and boards.
Choose the right mitigation dollar. Use the same evidence base to compare vegetation work against physical hardening. Finance can show avoided loss curves and cost-benefit tradeoffs—accelerating approvals and aligning with WMP goals.
Communicate clearly. Convert complex geospatial analytics into plain-English narratives for filings, investor updates, and community briefings. Transparency shortens tough conversations.
Why this matters now
Safety & reliability: Fewer ignitions and faster, better-targeted response.
Financial resilience: Lower expected losses, stronger cost-recovery cases, and clearer capital allocation.
Regulatory confidence: Evidence-based plans that align with WMP and PSPS requirements—without over- or under-scoping.
Organizational clarity: Shared situational awareness that tightens the loop between strategy and action.
Political Impact: For municipal utilities these issues matter to voters and, in a larger context, municipal bond holders. A wildfire not only destroys property but can devastate the tax base.
How does Voice of the Acre® help Distribution Companies solve their wildfire problems?
Athena Intelligence is a geospatial data vendor whose conditional profiling fuses wildfire and environmental datasets to generate a “digital fingerprint” of risk at any location. (The software allows humans to "hear" the earth describe the risk: hence its name, Voice of the Acre.) Rural utilities use a base map to prioritize corridors and assets for vegetation work and hardening. Athena's base maps are updated quarterly, which updates the WMP and any public information.
As power companies develop more experience with wildfire planning and prevention, their needs often change. They want better Public Safety Power Shutoff tools for execution and communication with the public. (Athena has circuit level analysis tool, based upon wildfire spread risk.)
They find they need tools for reporting to customers, bond holders, voters and/or regulators the efficiency of their investment in wildfire mitigation. In some regions this is a Risk Spend Efficiency report. In others it is a Wildfire Risk Spend ROI, based on the Financial Risk from wildfire.
Athena provides data that quantifies the risk - again, allowing utilities to combine their assets with the value of the public's assets and the likelihood of spread at all points.
Our clients span financial services, insurance, electric utilities, communities, and HOAs. Athena’s intelligence is accessible via an online portal and is already in use for WMPs, PSPS programs, and Risk-to-Financial-Impact reporting.