More than 4,000 power line-caused wildfires have occurred in Texas in the past three and a half years, costing the state and its citizens hundreds of millions of dollars. The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, with cooperation from the Texas A&M Forest Service, is conducting a project, funded by the Texas State Legislature, to demonstrate how the synergistic combination of advanced electrical waveform monitoring technology with wildfire forecast models can mitigate wildfire risks and losses across the State.

Electric utilities in Texas support the project by instrumenting approximately 100 of their electric distribution feeders with TEES’s Circuit Health Monitoring technology, which can detect current ignition threats, such as downed power lines, and future ignition threats from line apparatus currently experiencing pre-failure degradation. Utility company commitments are being formalized, in anticipation of installing the monitoring equipment in early Fall 2014.