Even as the region grapples with flooding, mudslides, snowmelt and other consequences of this year’s relentless storms, Southern California Edison remains focused on preventing wildfires.
On March 27, SCE, the electric utility subsidiary of Rosemead-based Edison International, submitted to state authorities its annual wildfire mitigation plan detailing steps to prevent the spread of wildfires for the next three years. Among other things, SCE in the plan said it was increasing the undergrounding of transmission wires and boosting its funding of firefighting equipment and personnel.
“SCE has identified specific high-risk areas across its service area where the undergrounding of power lines will be prioritized,” the utility stated in a release summarizing the major elements of the wildfire mitigation plan. “
In documents filed with the California Public Utilities Commission, SCE said undergrounding wires is the most expensive way to prevent its transmission grid from sparking wildfires. It gave a cost estimate to underground wires of about $3 million per mile, versus about $440,000 per mile for its preferred method of hardening the grid: covering existing wires with an additional layer of insulation.
If that cost estimate proves correct, SCE will spend approximately $300 million to underground those 100 miles of wires over the next three years.
As for the covered conductor program, SCE said it plans to install more than 2,850 additional miles of covered conductor by the end of 2025, bringing the total covered conductor miles to more than 7,200 miles in high fire-risk areas.
One of the more unusual elements of SCE’s plan is the funding of firefighting equipment and some personnel with local firefighting agencies. In this year’s plan, SCE said it is moving to a year-round funding program instead of just during peak firefighting season, which is generally for most of the second half of the calendar year.
The major component of this “quick reaction force” funding is for four large firefighting helitankers.
“In the past, we just helped fund these helitankers and support crews during the peak firefighting season,” SCE spokesman David Song said. “Now we’re moving to funding these year-round, which we expect will include a lot of standby time.”
A plan fact sheet released by SCE indicated that the utility spent roughly $18 million last year in lease payments for the helitankers and related fire-suppression equipment.
Even as SCE spends more to reduce the risk of wildfires, it’s also moving on a separate front to make its power grid more flexible as the state transitions to renewable energy sources, chiefly wind and solar.
In order to make the best use of these intermittent power sources and ensure the availability of power once the sun goes down, SCE has substantially increased its battery-storage program.
In December 2021, SCE entered into a $1.23 billion energy storage contract with Framingham, Massachusetts-based Ameresco Inc. in which Ameresco was to provide engineering, procurement, construction and maintenance for battery-storage facilities adjacent to three SCE power substations: 225 megawatts of storage capacity at the Springville substation in Tulare County, 200 megawatts at the Hinson Substation in Long Beach, and 112.5 megawatts at its Etiwanda substation in Rancho Cucamonga.
The original goal was to have the projects completed by last summer so the extra energy could be on call during last summer’s peak-demand season. But Ameresco encountered various delays in securing the equipment it needed, including lithium batteries from China.
