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Pacific Gas & Electric is one of the oldest and largest utilities in the United States. It’s also one of the most notorious.
The company serving Northern California was driven into bankruptcy after being found liable for the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, California. After restructuring and emerging in 2020, it was again found liable for the 2021 Dixie Fire. Needless to say, PG&E has since gotten the message that it needs to better fortify its equipment and surrounding environment. So while utilities aren’t generally renowned for their enthusiastic adoption of novel technologies, PG&E has been going all in on startups that can help prevent future disasters.
“More than half of our northern and central California service areas are within high fire threat areas, and a third of our assets are located in those areas,” PG&E spokesperson Paul Doherty told me. While PG&E’s service area doesn’t overlap with the L.A. fires, the growing list of gridtech and climate tech companies that it’s partnered with could serve as an example for other utilities in the state and country as a whole. In PG&E’s catalogue are vegetation management robots, power pole sensors, advanced fire detection cameras, and autonomous drones, with much of this enhanced by an artificial intelligence-powered analytics platforms.
In some ways, the 120-year-old utility is starting to act like a tech incubator. It hosted its first-ever innovation summit in 2023, where Doherty said it held a Shark Tank-style pitch fest to source ideas for a variety of grid challenges, including wildfire-related ones like system monitoring and vegetation management, ultimately receiving over 600 applications. Out of that, PG&E chose 24 concepts to move forward with in some form.
“My experience has been that they’re very focused on reducing risk,” Dave Winnacker, co-founder of the AI-powered risk visualization and mitigation platform XyloPlan, told me. “That attention is probably focused by the fact that they were held accountable and they had significant monetary losses, reputational losses.”
Last year, XyloPlan partnered with PG&E to pilot its software in the wildfire-prone Lake County, California. The platform provides insight into the areas most at risk from fast-moving fires, which Winnacker told me are much more damaging to communities and critical infrastructure than hot fires, known to be more destructive in forests. “So in our model and our future state, you can still have plenty of fire on the landscape, and you can even have plenty of fast-moving fire, but we have prioritized treatments that would disrupt those fast-moving fires that have the greatest consequences,” Winnacker, the former fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, told me. XyloPlan’s algorithm makes recommendations on where various resiliency efforts such as vegetation management would have the greatest impact.
Winnacker acknowledges though that for utilities, “it’s really difficult and risky to take something new on.” Not only could money be wasted if it doesn’t work out, but as Winnacker told me, “It can be perceived as an admission of your doing things wrong before. The tendency to assign blame makes it harder to adopt new and innovative things.”
“I think the toughest thing for a utility is to trust a technology,” Christina Park, senior director of energy strategy at the autonomous drone company Skydio, told me. A former veteran of the utility industry herself, Park spent 15 years at the New York Power Authority and understands why utilities would be reluctant to tweak at least formerly reliable services and infrastructure that millions of households depend upon. But as climate change brings drought and more extreme weather, and as utility infrastructure ages, evolution seems like the only option. “Based on all the confluence of factors that are kind of putting their backs against the wall, they are more open to change,” Park told me. “It’s just not possible to keep doing things the old way.”
Skydio, which was last valued at $2.2 billion after its 2023 Series E funding round, operates in three main markets — defense, public safety, and utilities. PG&E has been a customer of the company since 2022, and became the first California utility to conduct fully remote drone inspections of its assets in 2023. This was made possible after the utility secured a much-coveted waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that allows it to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight.
“An operator could fly a drone to a location that’s up over a mountain, right up over super steep, rugged terrain that would normally be really hard to access via helicopter, via foot, via vehicle, and now we have the capability to go inspect that,” Doherty told me. Six navigation cameras as well as onboard artificial intelligence and advanced computing allow Skydio drones to operate autonomously, docked and deployed at PG&E substations.
Park told me that PG&E, which has had a drone program since 2019, has used its aviation expertise to help Skydio develop key capabilities. “They have the knowledge in the drone space to really ask for more advanced features — being able to pick out when there is a zoom quality that they would really like to see or a certain lens.” After Skydio’s drones gather reams of visual data, algorithms can pinpoint the location and severity of any infrastructural defects. PG&E has developed its own A.I. model in house to do this.
PG&E is far from alone in its excitement over Skydio’s capabilities. The dronemaker has over 200 utility partnerships to date, and Park told me that across all of them she’s seeing more and more integration of new tech into the standard workflow. “Their business as usual, it just looks different than it did five years ago,” she told me. But while there might be an increased appetite in the industry for novel solutions, Winnacker warns that there are numerous logistical and financial barriers that can get in the way of promising tech moving from pilot to full-scale implementation.
“The challenge on these things always is that the benefit is very widespread, but there has to be someone who is the lead, and ultimately someone has to make the investment,” Winnacker told me. “That’s challenging, because there is a federal component, there’s a state component, there’s a local government component, there’s a non-government, land-owning agency component, and then there’s a small private property component. We have to mesh all of these.”
Sometimes, good companies with good ideas can languish as these various stakeholders with different perspectives and priorities wait for someone else to step up and foot the bill. As of now, Winnacker said he doesn’t know if PG&E is going to make a more significant investment in XyloPlan, although he said last year’s partnership proved fruitful.
But if PG&E does move forward with XyloPlan, or any other gridtech or wildfire mitigation tech for that matter, the success of that program will depend not just on the utility, but also on all the other governmental and non-governmental players that Winnacker mentioned. “There’s a need for really tight alignment, so that the work of one group compliments the other, and we don’t end up in this disjointed manner, where a lot of effort is occurring, but because it’s not coordinated, it’s not aligned, you don’t get that the reinforcing benefit of the network,” Winnacker told me.
Not to mention the fact that in rural and urban areas alike, there’s always competing demands and only so much money to go around. Especially in a state like California, which is facing a severe housing crisis, the perpetual question of prioritization looms over every budget decision. And while tech companies often promise to save utilities money in the long term — via both efficiency gains and avoided disaster costs — implementing new programs often means big upfront expenses, which typically leads to higher customer rates. And, well, everybody hates that.
Suffice it to say, there’s no perfect solution here, but inaction is the worst option of all. As Winnacker put it, “you eat an elephant one bite at a time.” So as Los Angeles recovers from some of the most destructive fires in the state’s history and utilities across the state open themselves up to new ways of doing business, “we need to start with these small bites to get moving so that we can get past the either nothing can be done, this is an act of nature discussion or this pie in the sky, oh, you know, a single tech silver bullet will just make this problem go away,” Winnacker told me.
“This is an all of the above approach, and the time is probably now, with regard to having everyone’s undivided attention on this for a very brief period of time.”
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Current conditions: Parts of North Dakota could feel wind chills of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the coming days • A fire at the world’s largest battery storage plant prompted evacuations and health warnings in California’s Monterey County • It is warm and sunny in Doha, where negotiators signed a ceasfire deal between Israel and Hamas.
Data from one of the longest-running and most reputable carbon dioxide observatories in the world suggests that atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas increased at a record rate in 2024. The Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii has been tracking atmospheric CO2 since 1958, and is “a good guide to rise in global average CO2 concentration,” according to the UK’s Met Office. Mauna Loa’s measurements show that between 2023 and 2024, CO2 concentrations rose by about 3.6 parts per million, the largest annual increase on record, meaning that not only are CO2 emissions still rising, but they’re rising faster than ever. This growth is not compatible with any pathways to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Annual CO2 concentrations and forecasts in PPM. The Keeling Curve and Met Office
Long-term CO2 concentrations dating back 2,000 years.The Keeling Curve and Met Office
“The actual CO2 rise of 3.58ppm was even faster than expected,” a group of climate researchers from the Met Office wrote for Carbon Brief. They speculate that the loss of natural carbon sinks – especially through wildfires and their resulting emissions – may explain the leap. Last year was the warmest on record, and the first calendar year to see temperatures rise above the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. It was also a record year for wildfires in the Americas.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office yesterday closed on a $6.57 billion loan to Rivian, less than two months after announcing the conditional loan. The money will help finance Project Horizon, a 9 million square foot EV manufacturing plant in Georgia, where Rivian plans to make some 400,000 mass market EVs per year, starting with its R2 and R3 models. It will support 2,000 full-time construction jobs and 7,500 operations jobs through 2030. “At full capacity, the EVs manufactured at the facility are expected to yield an annual fuel consumption savings of approximately 146 million gallons of petroleum,” the DOE said. The administration also closed a $1.66 billion loan for New York-based Plug Power to build six hydrogen plants. The LPO will likely come under scrutiny by the incoming Trump administration. In more Rivian news, Volkswagen is reportedly exploring ways to “deepen” its existing partnership with the carmaker.
The Department of Energy was busy yesterday. On top of the aforementioned financing deals, the LPO also offered $22.92 billion in conditional loans to eight electric utilities to help them make upgrades to boost clean power generation, storage, and transmission, as well as replacing leaky gas lines. The projects span 12 states and would serve nearly 15 million customers. The New York Times noted that this is “one of the biggest commitments ever made” by the LPO. With just three days left before Trump takes office, the loans still need to be finalized. But DOE sources told the Times that the loans are legally binding and difficult to revoke.
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Confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s energy and environment appointees continued yesterday, with Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum appearing before the Senate for their nominations as Environmental Protection Agency administrator and secretary of the Interior. For many in the renewables space, Burgum’s hearing offered little in the way of reassurances. He referenced concerns about the “baseload” of the grid more than 15 times during the hearing, primarily as a way to oppose the buildout of renewable energy. Burgum also touted “clean coal” (not so clean) as a pathway to decarbonizing, defended Trump’s skepticism of wind power, and dodged questions seeking reassurance about his commitment to protecting federal lands. EPA nominee Zeldin, meanwhile, said he believes climate change is real and conceded that carbon dioxide traps heat, but defended Trump’s denialism on the issue. He said he wants to make the EPA more efficient and transparent, and indicated that industry perspectives on environmental rules and enforcement actions will likely receive a kinder ear from the agency under his leadership.
In case you missed it: Google gave biochar a boost yesterday when it announced it will buy 200,000 tons of carbon removal credits by 2030 from two firms, Indian company Varaha and startup Charm Industrial. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, biochar is made by heating up biomass such as wood or plants in a low-oxygen environment via a process called pyrolysis, thereby sequestering up to 40% to 50% of the carbon contained within that organic matter for hundreds or even thousands of years. Varaha will generate biochar from an invasive plant; Charm will use biomass from forest management. Biochar is a “cheap, nature-based method” of carbon removal, Brigham says, and it’s been getting attention from corporate buyers. The Google partnerships are “the largest biochar carbon removal deals to date,” and aim to help the nascent industry scale.
“This isn’t a fiscal blip.”
–Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, former chair of the Senate Budget Committee, warns of an “accelerated collapse” in insurance markets due to climate disasters.
Doug Burgum is, by all accounts, a normie. Compared to some of the other picks for incoming President Trump’s cabinet, the former North Dakota governor is well respected by his political colleagues; even many of the Democrats on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee seemed chummy with the former software executive during his hearing on Thursday, praising his support of the outdoor recreation economy and his conservation efforts in his state. As if to confirm the low stakes of the hearing, Burgum used his closing remarks not as a final pitch of his qualifications — but to invite his interrogators to a Fourth of July party at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.
That isn’t to say that the hearing doesn’t have consequences — or revelations about what can be expected from the all-but-certain-to-be-confirmed Interior secretary and future head of Trump’s National Energy Council. For many in the renewables space — particularly those in the wind industry — there was little in the way of reassurances that Burgum would temper his boss’ opposition to “windmills.” Additionally, the future Interior secretary dodged questions seeking reassurance about his commitment to protecting federal lands.
Below are some of the biggest takeaways from Thursday’s confirmation hearing.
Burgum referenced concerns about the “baseload” of the grid more than 15 times during the hearing, primarily as a way to oppose the buildout of renewable energy. “We’re short of electricity in this country, and we have to make sure that we have a balance,” he told Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat, citing a standard Republican talking point about how the grid needs safeguards because “the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.” When pressured about how intermittent energy sources are used in combination with storage, he added that we’re still “a few years out” from such technologies and warned that in the meantime, there would be “more and more brownouts and blackouts because we aren’t going to have the balance in the grid.”
“I don’t want the word ‘baseload’ to be code for no renewables,” Angus King, the Independent Senator from Maine, later followed up. Burgum protested against that characterization — “It’s not for any political reasons that I distinguish [between intermittent and baseload], it’s just because of the physics of the grid” — but King wasn’t satisfied. “In your case, in North Dakota, 35% of your electricity comes from wind power,” King said. “I presume that your grid works well?”
Burgum stumbled in his answer: “It’s super stressed, as it is around the country,” he said. (In fact, transmission bottlenecks seem to be the bigger issue in the state.) He went on to say that renewables plus storage equals a baseload at a “much higher cost” than traditional energy sources like oil and gas.
“It sounds like no more renewables,” King rejoined. “I don’t think that’s a sustainable path for this country, and it’s certainly not a way of meeting the challenge of climate change.”
One carbon-free source of electricity emerged as a winner of the baseload fight, however: nuclear power. “I’m glad to hear you talk about baseload,” Republican Senator James Risch of Idaho told Burgum, “because when you’re talking about nuclear, you’re talking about baseload.” Burgum also called solar and geothermal “big opportunities” in Utah.
Ahead of Thursday’s confirmation hearing, Danielle Murray, the founder of the Public Lands Center, issued a statement arguing that if Burgum did not “[reject] any and all attempts to sell-off or give away our nation’s public lands,” it would be “disqualifying.”
She and other public land advocates are not likely to be satisfied with the answers they heard, however. Burgum responded positively to an opening question from Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah about restricting the size of National Monuments, noting that “a state like yours … already has over 60% of its land in public lands.” The Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s ranking member, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, followed up on that point, asking Burgum how he plans to “stay true to our conservation history” given the mounting attempts by Lee and his colleagues to “somehow, in a wholesale way, divest of our public lands.”
Burgum remained noncommittal: “I think there is certainly the opportunity for us to find that balance going forward,” he said again.
Burgum promised senators from Montana and Wyoming that he opposed a “blanket approach of trying to block” new coal development. “We have an opportunity to decarbonize, to produce clean coal, and with that produce reliable baseload for this country,” he said.
Why is that so important? “Without baseload, we’re going to lose the AI arms race to China,” Burgum said.
Wind was another hot topic during Burgum’s confirmation hearing. King pointed out that North Dakota is a major wind-producing state, and asked if the Interior nominee would talk to President Trump about “the fact that wind has its virtues and can contribute significantly” to America’s energy supply.
Burgum was resistant. If wind projects “make sense, and they’re already in law, then they’ll continue,” he allowed. “I think President Trump has been very clear in his statements that he’s concerned about the significant amount of tax incentives that have gone towards some forms of energy that have helped exacerbate this imbalance that we’re seeing right now.”
Risch celebrated Burgum’s skepticism of wind, rooting for the end of the Lava Ridge wind farm, which Heatmap’s Jael Holzman has reported Trump may kill on day one. “My good friend Senator King and I have different views on windmills — and bless you for taking the windmills, you can have them all,” Risch offered during his allotted time. “We don’t want them in Idaho. We hate windmills in Idaho.” (In 2023, wind accounted for about 15% of Idaho’s electricity generation.)
But if there was something Republicans on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee hated even more than wind, it was bears. Senator Daines of Montana specifically requested Burgum’s commitment to delisting grizzlies from the Endangered Species List, and he got what he was looking for. “I’m with you,” Burgum said. “We should be celebrating when species come off the endangered species list, as opposed to fighting every way we can to try to keep them on that list.”
Risch was also excited about this promise. “We don’t want grizzly bears [in Idaho],” he said. “They kill people. You know, the federal government already gave us wolves.”
Grizzlies weren’t the only bears on the chopping block. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska slammed the Biden administration’s Interior for not finishing its revised incidental take regulations for North Slope oil and gas activities — that is, the gas industry’s exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 which otherwise prohibits the harassing, hunting, capturing, or killing of protected animals, including polar bears. “I need your commitment that you’ll work with Alaskans, particularly the Inupiat people up there, in the North Slope Borough, on basically all things polar bear,” Murkowski said.
“We’ll be happy to do that,” Burgum confirmed.
And other takeaways from the confirmation hearing for Trump’s nominee for EPA administrator.
Confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s energy and environment appointees continued Thursday, with Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum appearing before the Senate for their nominations as Environmental Protection Agency administrator and secretary of the Interior. While Burgum was long tipped to get a major energy-related position in the Trump administration, Zeldin’s nomination was more of a surprise. While he worked on some local water and environmental issues during his time as a congressman from eastern Long Island, he was mostly known for his work on foreign and defense policy issues.
While Zeldin is likely to be confirmed thanks to the Republicans’ 53-47 Senate majority, he did not receive the same bipartisan lovefest as Chris Wright did in his hearing Wednesday for his nomination as secretary of Energy. Zeldin was formally introduced only by a Republican, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, whereas Wright received introductions from a Democrat and Republican on the panel examining him.
Here are three takeaways from today’s proceedings:
When asked by Senator Bernie Sanders “Do you agree with President-elect Trump that climate change is a hoax?" Zeldin, a former member of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus when in the House, said “I believe that climate change is real,” but then went on to say that Trump’s frequent claims, largely made during the 2016 presidential campaign, that climate change is a hoax was more a criticism of policy than a judgment of climate science.
When asked by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about what effect carbon dioxide emissions had on the atmosphere, after some back and forth about listening to scientists and what obligations the EPA had to regulate carbon dioxide, Zeldin said “trapping heat.”
Throughout the hearing, Zeldin returned again and again to the idea that he wanted the EPA to focus on, as Trump often says, “clean air and clean water,” that he wanted to “increase productivity of the EPA,” and that he wanted it to be “accountable and transparent.” While this sounds like so much Washington boilerplate, it is likely a sign that Zeldin will not be advocating for any increase in the EPA’s roles or responsibilities and would try to operate the agency with budgetary and conceptual restraint.
Zeldin did not endorse a proposal to move EPA’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., or comments by Department of Government Efficiency co-head Vivek Ramaswamy that the government headcount should be reduced by three-quarters, instead saying “I’m not aware of a single person fired at the EPA during the first Trump administration” (many employees left under the leadership of Scott Pruitt).
Several Republican senators had specific grievances with the current — or past — Democratic EPA leadership and policy, largely around how the agency deals with local industries. Senator Todd Sullivan of Alaska criticized the EPA (in 2013) for sending armed agents to inspect a mine in Alaska; Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas was critical of “one size fits all solutions” that applied to the state’s low-productivity “stripper” oil wells; Senator John Boozman of Arkansas said the EPA agenda under Biden “was shaped by the input from narrow group of stakeholders,” and asked Zeldin “how will you work with industries more collectively to ensure that their concerns are addressed while maintaining a balanced approach to environmental protection?”
“The worst thing that I could possibly do, that the EPA could do is to turn a blind eye to great substantive feedback that will better inform our decisions,” Zeldin said, indicating that industry perspectives on environmental rules and enforcement actions will likely receive a kinder ear under Zeldin than his predecessor.
Exactly what those issues will be was not immediately clear in the hearing. Any discussion of greenhouse gas emissions had to be practically extracted from Zeldin by Democratic senators, while at the same time Zeldin would not commit to scrapping Biden-era rules on power plant and tailpipe emissions (which Trump frequently targeted on the campaign trail), instead saying that he wouldn’t “prejudge” any rule-making.