Assistance with Utility Risk Modeling in California

Synapse assisted The Utility Reform Network (TURN) in California with analyzing and responding to Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PG&E’s) quantitative risk modeling methods. This work included recommendations to improve the accuracy of PG&E’s wildfire consequence estimates and its assumptions about the effectiveness of specific wildfire mitigation strategies. For example, Synapse helped TURN demonstrate that PG&E’s cost-benefit ratios were misleading and inaccurate, that its calculation of outage risk from Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) was highly skewed when compared to historical data, and that its assumptions about post-wildfire financial damages were incorrectly calculated.