San Diego Gas & Electric's grid modernization story in 2026 is really a wildfire story first and a technology story second. Nearly every major sensor, camera, and software investment the utility has made to its distribution grid over the past decade traces back to a single driving concern: preventing utility equipment from sparking a wildfire, and minimizing the disruption when power has to be shut off preemptively to avoid one. That framing matters for understanding why San Diego's grid modernization looks different from a typical Midwest or Northeast utility's approach to smart grid investment.
At the center of SDG&E's approach is WiNGS, a cloud-based risk modeling platform that combines a visual representation of the utility's physical infrastructure with real-time weather data, historical ignition records, tree-strike analysis, wildfire behavior modeling, and Public Safety Power Shutoff probability into a single system. Rather than treating grid hardening as a uniform, evenly distributed program, WiNGS lets SDG&E quantify wildfire risk down to specific infrastructure segments and convert that risk into an annualized dollar value factoring in potential liability, outage costs, and public health impact which the utility then weighs against the cost of interventions like undergrounding a specific line segment. This turns an expensive, hard-to-prioritize category of infrastructure spending into something closer to a data-driven capital allocation decision, directing limited undergrounding and hardening budget toward the specific circuits where the risk-adjusted return is highest, rather than spreading investment evenly across the service territory.
The physical and sensor infrastructure behind SDG&E's wildfire mitigation program has expanded substantially:
- Strategic Undergrounding: SDG&E has undergrounded more than 60% of overhead power lines in its service territory, with the program which began in 2019 expected to continue through 2032, prioritized specifically in the highest wildfire-risk areas identified through WiNGS.
- A dedicated wildfire camera network: More than 100 cameras continuously monitor the service territory for early signs of fire activity, including 17 high-definition, pan-tilt-zoom cameras that stream live video to help CAL FIRE locate and size up wildfires before crews arrive on scene.
- Falling Conductor Protection: A patented system, engineered and tested in SDG&E's own lab, that detects when a power line has broken and de-energizes it before it hits the ground addressing one of the most direct mechanical causes of utility-sparked wildfires.
- Sectionalizing devices: Equipment that isolates faults on overhead lines to limit the size and customer impact of any resulting outage, whether from equipment failure or a proactive shutoff.
- Seven microgrids, either operational or under construction, capable of keeping critical facilities fire stations, schools, and infrastructure like CAL FIRE's Air Attack Base in Ramona energized during a Public Safety Power Shutoff event, rather than leaving them fully dark along with the surrounding community.
- A dedicated Fire Science & Climate Adaptation team, including full-time meteorologists producing microclimate fire-behavior forecasts for grid operators, a genuinely unusual internal capability for a utility to maintain in-house rather than relying purely on external weather services.
Beyond the visible infrastructure, SDG&E has invested in the less visible software backbone needed to actually operate a modernized grid. An Advanced Distribution Management System integrates outage management with distribution management, tying together SCADA data, geographic information systems, customer information systems, and advanced metering infrastructure into a unified operational view. Features like Fault Location, Isolation, and Service Restoration (FLISR) and suggested switching tools are aimed at reducing how long an outage lasts once it occurs, by helping operators pinpoint problems and reroute power faster than manual processes would allow. A dedicated Integrated Test Facility lab lets SDG&E engineers test new grid technologies including inverter communication protocols needed to integrate a growing volume of rooftop solar and battery storage onto the distribution grid in a controlled environment before field deployment.
SDG&E has invested more than $3 billion in wildfire prevention measures over the past decade, and that spending has become an increasingly visible share of what customers actually pay. Wildfire-related costs covering vegetation management, hardening infrastructure like undergrounding, and rebuilding damaged infrastructure reached roughly 10% of SDG&E's total system revenue requirement as of a recent reporting period, up from about 6% the year before, with wildfire-related costs increasing by more than 60% year over year during that window. This cost trajectory has drawn scrutiny from California's Public Advocates Office, which tracks utility spending on behalf of ratepayers, underscoring a genuine tension in grid modernization funding: the sensors, undergrounding, and AI-driven risk modeling genuinely reduce wildfire risk, but the bill for that risk reduction shows up directly on customer electric rates, in a state where electricity costs are already a significant point of public concern.
It's worth resisting a purely celebratory framing of SDG&E's grid modernization program, since the underlying tradeoff is real and directly affects the same customers the investment is meant to protect. Undergrounding a mile of distribution line costs dramatically more than maintaining the equivalent overhead infrastructure, and that cost, along with the sensor networks, cameras, and software systems described above, flows through to customer rates via the regulatory revenue requirement process. The California Public Advocates Office's own tracking shows this isn't a marginal cost increase wildfire-related spending has become one of the fastest-growing components of what SDG&E customers pay, and similar cost growth is playing out at Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison as all three of the state's major investor-owned utilities pursue comparable grid-hardening strategies under state-mandated wildfire mitigation plans. The technology genuinely reduces wildfire risk; it does so at a real and rising cost that regulators, utilities, and customers are still working through how to fairly allocate.
SDG&E's approach shares clear DNA with the grid-hardening strategies pursued by Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, both of which operate under the same state wildfire mitigation plan requirements and have committed tens of billions of dollars combined toward similar undergrounding and hardening programs. PG&E in particular has pursued an even larger undergrounding target following its 2019 bankruptcy driven by wildfire liability, with a long-term goal spanning thousands of miles of transmission infrastructure. What distinguishes SDG&E's program somewhat is the degree of integration between its physical hardening work and its predictive modeling the WiNGS platform's role in actively directing capital allocation, rather than hardening being pursued more uniformly, reflects a utility that was an early mover on this kind of quantitative risk-based prioritization relative to some of its California peers.
The next phase of SDG&E's grid modernization, based on its own reporting, focuses on extending predictive capability further upstream using WiNGS-style modeling not just to prioritize where hardening investment goes, but to more precisely calibrate when and where Public Safety Power Shutoffs are actually necessary, since over-broad shutoffs create real economic and safety costs for customers who lose power despite facing minimal actual risk. Continued integration of distributed energy resources the growing volume of customer-owned solar and battery storage connecting to the grid also requires ongoing investment in the kind of real-time monitoring and communication standards SDG&E's test lab has been developing, since a grid designed decades ago for one-directional power flow from a central plant to homes needs fundamentally different sensing and control logic to safely manage power flowing in multiple directions across thousands of individual customer-owned systems.
Frequently asked questions
WiNGS is a cloud-based risk modeling platform combining infrastructure data, weather, historical ignitions, and wildfire behavior modeling to help SDG&E prioritize where to invest in undergrounding and grid hardening based on quantified, location-specific wildfire risk rather than uniform spending.
More than 60% of overhead power lines in SDG&E's service territory have been undergrounded as of recent reporting, with the Strategic Undergrounding Program expected to continue through 2032.
It's a patented SDG&E technology that detects when a power line has physically broken and de-energizes it before it contacts the ground, directly addressing one of the most common mechanical causes of utility-sparked wildfires.
SDG&E has invested more than $3 billion in wildfire prevention over the past decade, and wildfire-related costs have grown to represent roughly 10% of the utility's total system revenue requirement collected from customers, up significantly from prior years.
Microgrids are generally designed to keep specific critical facilities like fire stations, schools, and emergency response infrastructure energized during a Public Safety Power Shutoff, rather than powering the surrounding community broadly.
SDG&E's Advanced Distribution Management System and dedicated testing lab support the communication and monitoring standards needed to safely integrate a growing volume of customer-owned solar and battery storage onto a grid originally designed for one-directional power flow.
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