Technosylva, a provider of wildfire science and extreme weather risk intelligence, recently announced Technosylva Planning, its next-generation extreme weather planning application, formerly called FireSight.

Built to assess multiple hazards in one application, Technosylva Planning helps electric utilities facing affordability pressures and growing electricity demand identify where their systems are most vulnerable to wildfire and extreme weather threats, prioritize mitigation investments, strengthen long-term grid resilience and build data-backed cases for regulators and governing boards.

Technosylva Planning combines proprietary weather and risk modeling with each utility's asset, outage and ignition data to help determine where mitigation spending can deliver the greatest risk reduction. The company's wildfire modeling has been validated against hundreds of thousands of fires and has provided the foundation for analyses reviewed by regulators, auditors and investors.

As extreme weather hazards increase, utilities must harden existing infrastructure and expand their networks while regulators increasingly expect them to quantify and, in some cases, put a dollar value on the multi-hazard risk reduction their spending delivers.

Technosylva Planning will bring wildfire, flood, wind, extreme temperatures, winter storms and convective storms into one application. Monetary consequence estimates, annualized risk values and utility-specific configurations help translate these complex risks into financial terms, supporting more informed decisions about where and how to invest.

For more than a decade, utilities have relied on Technosylva to guide wildfire mitigation and resilience investments and meet regulatory requirements. About 40 utilities now use its analysis, which has informed resilience plans filed with state commissions and governing boards across the United States, totaling more than $25 billion in approved investments.

"Utilities are striving to improve affordability for their customers while strengthening their networks against extreme weather. That makes prudent capital investment essential," said Bryan Spear, CEO of Technosylva. "Technosylva Planning helps risk and finance teams translate complex wildfire and extreme weather science into numbers they can use to weigh mitigation trade-offs and make more informed decisions about how to protect their systems and the communities they serve."

Connecting Extreme Weather Science to Investment Decisions

Built on 30 years of Technosylva's wildfire and extreme weather science, Technosylva Planning calculates risk for each utility asset, combining high-resolution proprietary data with utility-specific data to assess risk at the territory, circuit and circuit-segment levels.

New capabilities include:

Across hazards

• Cost-effectiveness calculations: Using monetary consequence and annualized risk values, utilities can calculate benefit-cost ratios and risk-spend efficiency to allocate their mitigation dollars effectively.
• Flexible analysis configurations: Allows utilities to select monetary or physical measures of consequences (e.g., buildings threatened, acres burned or lives threatened), along with other analysis options that fit their methodologies and regulatory requirements.

Wildfire

• Monetary consequence analysis: Converts modeled wildfire impacts, including area burned, structures destroyed and population affected, into estimated financial consequences.
• Annualized risk values: Estimates an asset's wildfire risk in a typical year, enabling utilities to weigh risk against annual mitigation budgets in cost-benefit and payback-period analyses.
• Utility-specific failure and ignition modeling: Calibrates outage and ignition probabilities using utilities' historical outage and ignition data combined with Technosylva's historical weather analysis.

Flood

• Asset-level flood risk: Links each utility's assets to modeled flood depths across a range of flood scenarios, so utilities can see flood exposure alongside wildfire risk in one application.

Powered By More than 9 Billion Wildfire Simulations a Day

Technosylva Planning is a long-term risk assessment and system planning tool in Technosylva's enterprise software suite that forecasts wildfire conditions and supports both real-time operational decisions and strategic investment decisions. By combining advanced weather forecasting with local fuels modeling, the platform runs billions of simulations every day to predict risks to homes, communities and grid infrastructure.

Technosylva's science is used in nine countries by about 40 electric utilities, including Arizona Public Service, CORE Electric Cooperative and Pacific Gas and Electric; more than 100 insurance providers; and major public fire agencies, including the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE).