A Real-World Case Study: How Wildfire Intelligence Protects the Grid

Electrical utilities face a unique version of wildfire risk. It isn’t just about protecting people and property from fire, it’s about protecting the infrastructure that everyone depends on, while also making sure that infrastructure isn’t the thing starting the fire in the first place. To show how our wildfire intelligence platform handles that challenge, we walked through a real case study built around AltaLink in Alberta, covering two of their sites: one northern, one southern.

Everything on One Map

The platform starts with a single operational map that layers in everything a utility needs to see at once: cameras, fire department locations, electrical stations, transmission lines, lightning strikes, and reported fires. Instead of piecing together separate systems, utility teams get one consolidated picture of risk across their service territory.

Faster Detection, Backed by Eight Satellites

At the southern AltaLink site, several fires are already visible on the map, detected well before most platforms would catch them. That’s because our system pulls from eight satellites simultaneously, instead of relying on just one. The result is much tighter temporal resolution, meaning fires get caught faster. Clicking into any detection brings up its full details instantly.

A Risk System Built From Four Products

At the core of the platform is a risk system built from four products: the Wildfire Hazard Index (WHI), the Fire Weather Index (FWI), Ignition Source, and an overall Fire Risk score.

WHI refreshes automatically every 24 hours and can be projected forward, showing risk climb through hot afternoon hours and drop again overnight, following expected temperature swings. It also factors in vegetation, both volume and dryness, cross-referenced against FWI’s weather data. That means a zone with dry, dense vegetation but recent rainfall will correctly show a lower combined risk, rather than a flat, misleading vegetation score.

Understanding Ignition Risk

Ignition Source tracks three distinct causes: infrastructure (power and transmission lines), lightning, and human activity such as camping. Lightning only counts strikes from the past hour for ignition purposes, though the map displays a full 24 hours of strikes for context. Ignition Risk itself refreshes every 10 to 15 minutes, combining ignition source data with burn potential for a constantly updated picture.

One added layer of precision: flare filtering. Satellites can sometimes mistake industrial flares for wildfires. Our platform filters those out using confidence scoring, since true wildfires typically read 80 to 90 percent confidence, while flares tend to read closer to 60 percent.

Tools Built for On-Demand Analysis

Beyond the automated monitoring at sites like AltaLink’s, the tools panel lets teams select any region and run Fuel Load, FWI, or WHI analysis on request. A weather point tool delivers temperature, humidity, wind, and precipitation across a 24-hour window centered on the present moment. A satellite imagery search tool allows filtering by date and cloud cover, with options like SWIR and true color composites.

The most powerful piece is spread analysis. Teams can simulate fire spread from a single point, multiple points, a fire line, a polygon, or even overlapping multi-polygons, with ember spread modeling shaped by real terrain, so steep slopes visibly limit how far particles travel.

A Full Operational Picture

Beyond the map itself, dedicated dashboards cover overview, live fire activity, weather, vegetation and fuel, infrastructure risk, camera intelligence, and full history and reporting, giving utility teams a complete operational view in one place.

An AI Agent That Does the Work

Finally, the platform’s AI agent puts all of this behind a simple conversation. Ask it how fire conditions look today, or tell it to run a spread simulation, and it handles the request instantly, no manual setup required.

Built for the Realities Utilities Face

The AltaLink case study shows what this platform was built to do: give electrical utilities a faster, clearer, more complete picture of wildfire risk across their infrastructure, from detection through to decision.