On the hunt for cheap and fast strategies to prevent deadly wildfires, utilities across the US and Europe are contracting with a handful of artificial intelligence startups to map wildfire risk along thousands of miles of power lines, picking out individual trees to cut and poles to replace.
The most obvious way to prevent power equipment from sparking a blaze is to bury lines underground. But at a cost of upwards of $3 million a mile, many investor-owned utilities are limiting themselves to just a few hundred miles of buried lines per year. That’s proved to be a major business opportunity for several tech companies that use machine learning to deliver custom recommendations for targeted, relatively low-cost fixes — including some that can be paid for from maintenance budgets.