Over the past several years, electric utilities have heard from their regulators  — and their own boards  — to stop wildfires before they start. In response, they have buried and covered lines, installed weather stations, upgraded equipment, trimmed vegetation, built risk models, and shut off power when the weather turned dangerous. Much of that work was overdue. Much of it has helped.

But even the best prevention strategy has limits. Trees come down. Embers travel. Lightning strikes. Equipment fails. Utilities can lower ignition risk, but they cannot make it disappear.

The remaining gap is ensuring that, when an ignition occurs, crews can move quickly enough to keep it small.

Why utility-funded suppression is controversial 

There are good reasons why investing in fire suppression makes some utility lawyers, executives, and regulators uncomfortable. Utilities across the West have already committed billions to wildfire mitigation.

In California, PG&E and Southern California Edison alone plan to spend more than $23 billion on wildfire prevention through 2025 — a 26 percent increase over their prior three-year cycle. In Oregon, PacifiCorp will invest $875 million over the next three years, while Hawaiian Electric plans to spend $450 million over a similar period.

Asking ratepayers to fund a new category of wildfire spending — especially one that sounds like firefighting — is not an easy sell.

Liability is tricky too. A utility that pays for suppression resources may worry that, if those resources do not contain a fire, it has created a new argument for plaintiffs: you had the ability to intervene, and you failed. Then there is jurisdiction. Utilities run wires. Firefighters fight fires. Blurring that line can create confusion and duplication.

Those concerns are real, but utilities and regulators have managed similar questions before. Wildfire monitoring cameras, for example, have improved coordination with emergency responders without turning utilities into fire departments.

How Maui exposed the suppression gap

The Lahaina fire in August 2023 was a catastrophe, but official and technical reviews do not support a simple, single-cause explanation for what happened. What they do show is the importance of the early window: the period when detection, communication, access, and available personnel can change a fire’s trajectory.

For those who have spent years inside utility regulation, that lesson lands differently after Maui. The instinct to keep utilities in their traditional lane is understandable. But in the highest-risk places, relying on uneven fire-service capacity is not a sufficient plan.

Current gaps are too wide to assume resources will be ready for every ignition. Staffing, equipment, and response times vary widely across municipal, rural, state, and federal agencies. For example, according to data from the National Firefighter Registry, more than 60% of firefighters nationwide are unpaid, and with volunteer numbers dropping, we’re facing a shortage.

In many utility service territories, the first few minutes of a fire depend on a patchwork system not designed for today’s wildfire conditions. Improved coordination between utilities, federal, state, and municipal authorities will help, but not close the gap quickly enough.

Utilities are not bystanders. Many already have fire modeling tools, cameras, sensors, circuit-level risk data, and communications networks that can be useful when minutes matter. PG&E even has dozens of safety and infrastructure protection teams to protect the company’s assets.  That does not mean lineworkers should become firefighters. It does mean utilities and regulators need a clearer way to decide when utility-funded suppression belongs in the wildfire plan.

Consequence reduction, not private firefighting

A better frame is consequence reduction. Utilities have already spent billions reducing ignition risk, and many of the most cost-effective prevention measures are well underway. A few targeted investments in reducing the consequences of ignitions, by contrast, could have an outsized impact.

Utilities should not build private fire departments. The goal is narrower: arm utilities in a way that gives high-risk communities the equivalent of a fire extinguisher — a way to act in the first minutes, before public fire resources can arrive.

That could include cameras and remote monitoring, hardened communications, pre-positioned initial-attack aerial resources, water access improvements like dip tanks, and joint training so utility field crews know what to do when they are first on scene.

The missing piece is governance

The even harder problem is governance. Regulators have spent years building processes to review ignition-prevention spending, from covered conductors and vegetation management to weather stations and de-energization programs. They have not built equally clear rules for investments aimed at reducing the consequences of fires once they start.

A workable framework is not a blank check. Regulators could require three things: target the highest-risk places, coordinate with fire agencies before deployment, and report back on what worked and what didn’t. That coordination has to include operational basics, including airspace.

A utility drone and a fire-agency helicopter cannot be managed through informal goodwill alone; someone needs clear authority to dispatch, sequence, and ground assets safely. This gets even more complex in large parts of the country where utility infrastructure sits on federal land.

Lawmakers may also need to address liability directly. Utilities should not be shielded from negligence. But they should not be punished for reasonable, regulator-approved investments aimed at changing the trajectory of a fire while there is still time to act.

What utilities and regulators have to decide

The choice is not between prevention and suppression.

In the highest-risk communities, regulators should ask utilities a harder question: after you have reduced ignition risk as far as practicable, what is your plan for the fire that still starts?

Utilities should not replace firefighters. But they should help build the layered response capacity today’s wildfire risk demands.

Staying on the suppression sidelines may feel safe to some utilities and regulators. Increasingly, it is its own form of risk.

-Jim Kapsis and Jay Griffin