By Hannah Grover
The Public Service Company of New Mexico is monitoring weather closely as it determines whether to shutoff electricity to prevent wildfires.
Omni Warner, vice president of PNM’s operations and engineering, said four severe weather incidents have led PNM to send out notice that a public safety power shutoff could be needed.
“There’s eight different weather models that we’re monitoring and learning the variation of the weather models, because some of them are used for forecasts that are further out in time, and others are used in more real time,” Warner said.
One of the lessons the utility has learned during the past incidents was that there’s a lack of weather stations in parts of its service territory in New Mexico. This makes it harder to evaluate real-time changes in conditions.
“When we make the determination to turn the power off, we want to push that decision to the very last minute, which means that we want real-time measurements to align with our forecast before we make the determination,” Warner said.
While the decision to turn off power is delayed until the last minute, PNM tries to keep the public informed about the possibility well in advance.
Warner said that in the coming years, there will be an increase in weather stations across the service territory.
Currently, PNM often relies on publicly available weather information, including from stations in people’s backyards.
Warner said the utility is working with state and local emergency responders and, if there are opportunities to partner on installing weather stations, PNM is open to that. However, PNM is also looking at utility-owned weather stations.
Public safety power shutoffs are one of the tools used to prevent wildfires. Another tool is vegetation management. Warner said PNM uses artificial intelligence to monitor its infrastructure in areas that are more prone to fires. This allows the utility to track the rate of vegetation growth and its proximity to infrastructure.
He said PNM has also worked with the Gila National Forest near Silver City to widen some of its right of ways and is looking to do the same in the Sandia and Cibola national forests in the future.
“The widening of those right of ways will actually create a firebreak for the national forest and other communities,” he said.
He said these wider rights of way will be similar to those seen around transmission lines where trees are cleared all the way to the ground. This is not the typical practice for distribution lines, where the vegetation may be cleared away from the lines but is generally not taken all the way to the ground.
While wind is the main factor in determining whether to shut off power, PNM also looks at vegetation, including the moisture content of the nearby plants. Warner said the utility also considers humidity levels.
Warner encouraged customers to go to pnm.com/wildfiresafety for tips on how to prepare for the power shutoffs.
“We’re really encouraging customers just to be prepared, whether it’s an outage that’s caused by the storm or an outage where we, as a last resort, have to turn the power off,” he said.
Warner said customers can also sign up for outage alerts.
He also encouraged customers to contact PNM if they experience a power outage.