Wildfire Mitigation Plans for Oregon Electric Utilities

Recently, Oregon’s utility regulators set new rules for wildfire protections. Now, our state’s electric utilities must file a Wildfire Mitigation Plan each year. These plans aim to lower the risk of wildfires caused by electric utilities and keep customers safer in the event of a wildfire threat in their area.

CUB pushed for stronger rules to hold these utilities accountable and prioritize the most vulnerable customers. Moving forward, CUB will continue to be involved as utilities submit their plans.

What is Included in a Wildfire Mitigation Plan?

Each year, electric utilities must file a plan to handle wildfire danger in their service areas. These plans include identifying wildfire risks where they are delivering electricity. Utilities also must identify risks around where they are moving electricity across distances. (e.g. power lines).

Through their analysis, utilities must include a description of what they are doing to reduce wildfire risk. This includes:

• Vegetation management
• System hardening
• Investment decisions
• Operational decisions

Utilities also need to describe how their new annual plan compares to the last year and why they made changes.

In addition to analysis and system plans, utilities must also plan for engagement strategies. This includes their plans to work with local fire departments, local governments, and other public safety partners.

Why are Wildfire Mitigation Plans Important?

Safety violations have increased across Oregon’s largest electric utilities. As wildfires continue to get worse, we need plans to keep our communities safe. In 2021, the state legislature passed a new law directing utility regulators to enforce tighter safety standards for utilities.

Wildfire Mitigation Plans are meant to set clear rules and plans for how utilities will work to prevent wildfires in our state. They also should inform customers of potential outages due to threats of wildfires. This includes notice of planned outages to mitigate wildfire risk called Public Safety Power Shutoffs. While this is the first year these rules have been in place, CUB is hopeful that this framework will minimize wildfire risk in the future.

CUB Will Keep Advocating for Wildfire Prevention

In the coming years, CUB will be looking at how well utilities are following their Wildfire Mitigation Plans and the overall rules. We will be advocating for customers for both safety and affordability. We will also be pushing for the rules to go even further to protect low-income customers and those in the highest-risk areas for wildfires.

Already, CUB has pushed back against Pacific Power’s requests to significantly raise rates in several settings. This year, the utility asked the PUC to approve a $19.9 million rate increase for wildfire protection investments and costs.  Because Pacific Power is already asking for significant rate increases, we are concerned about the impact on the utility’s customers.

CUB believes investments in wildfire protections are important, but they also must be smart. We will be part of this investigation and will fight to ensure that any mechanism to recover rate increases from wildfire protections is fair and reasonable. We are also pushing the utility to spread out various costs over longer periods of time to prevent large bill increases from breaking customers’ budgets.

As utilities roll out their plans, CUB knows that they will be looking to pass costs on to Oregon households. We will be tracking these costs and pushing to keep bills affordable for customers.

 

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