Environment 
Decades of research finally reveal how wildfire smoke begins destroying power grids miles away from the nearest flame
During California’s 2020 wildfire season, more than 10,000 distribution poles were destroyed and over 3 million customers lost power. Some of those outages weren’t caused by flames reaching the lines — they were triggered by smoke alone, which deposited conductive particles on high-voltage insulators and caused electrical failures miles from any fire.
That season wasn’t an anomaly. It was part of a pattern researchers have been tracking for more than two decades. Now, a comprehensive review of 102 studies published between 1999 and 2025 is mapping, in precise detail, how and why power grids fail when wildfires come close — and what it may take to stop them.
A slow-building crisis that science is finally catching up to
Research on wildfire impacts to power systems didn’t surge overnight. From 1999 through roughly 2020, studies trickled out steadily — useful, but scattered. Then the pace accelerated sharply, mirroring the global escalation of wildfire frequency and severity that climate scientists have been documenting in parallel.
North America leads in advanced mitigation tools — LiDAR-based vegetation management, real-time fire-weather forecasting, and Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS).
Global wildfire carbon emissions rose 16% in 2023 alone, driven by unprecedented fire events in Canada, Europe, South America, and Hawaii. Those fires pushed smoke plumes across multiple continents, degrading air quality and straining power systems far from any flame. What the new 102-study review adds is structure — the first equipment-focused synthesis built on 27 years of experimental, modeling, and field evidence.
How smoke and heat attack the grid from the inside
Flames don’t need to touch a power line to knock it out. Smoke particulates and ash depositing on insulators lower their flashover voltage — the threshold at which electricity jumps across a gap it shouldn’t — triggering faults miles from the fire’s edge. Thermal radiation from nearby wildfires also causes overhead conductors to sag excessively, raising the risk of vegetation contact and potentially igniting new fires.
High-impedance faults (HIFs) make this loop harder to break. When a conductor touches vegetation, the resulting fault produces minimal current — often below what standard protection relays detect. Sustained arcing can continue unnoticed, generating enough heat to ignite dry material. Engineering models now quantify how molten metal particles ejected during conductor faults carry enough thermal energy to ignite dry vegetation upon landing.
Renewable energy caught in the crossfire
The energy transition adds a new dimension to wildfire risk. During the 2023 Canadian wildfire season, PV output reductions of up to 50% were recorded in affected areas. In California, a significant share of hydroelectric and geothermal generators sit within zones designated as “very high fire hazard severity areas,” where ash and sediment runoff can contaminate reservoirs and reduce output.
Wind turbines face both direct fire risk and smoke-related performance degradation. Battery energy storage systems (BESS), increasingly deployed to support grid resilience, introduce their own hazard: concentrated energy in compact enclosures means thermal runaway — if triggered by wildfire conditions — can produce high-temperature jets and flammable gases.
A global problem with regional fingerprints
Wildfire damage to power infrastructure isn’t a California story. Portugal lost more than 1,200 kilometers of distribution lines and 5,000 poles in its 2017 fires. Australia’s 2019–2020 bushfires destroyed over 5,000 poles and damaged more than 1,000 kilometers of lines. Chile’s 2023 fires affected over 300,000 customers and contaminated substations with ash. The scale varies, but the pattern holds.
North America leads in advanced mitigation tools — LiDAR-based vegetation management, real-time fire-weather forecasting, and Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). Europe and Australia are deploying satellite-based fire detection and UAV-assisted inspections. The review’s incident data also captures Ethiopian rural feeder outages and Chinese transmission line disruptions, confirming the problem extends well beyond traditionally studied regions.
Hardening the grid: from insulated wires to fire-rated battery enclosures
Replacing bare overhead conductors with insulated “tree wire” or spacer cables is one of the most direct ways to reduce fault-induced ignitions, and swapping wooden poles for fire-resistant materials adds another layer. Substations present more complex challenges: oil-filled transformers can generate catastrophic secondary fires, and hardening measures include fire-rated walls, bunding systems, and controlled de-energization protocols — documented across incidents in Portugal, Chile, Greece, and California.
BESS installations require dedicated attention. Emerging practices include fire-rated enclosures, physical separation between units, and Battery Management System schemes enabling rapid isolation. Advanced reconductoring — replacing conventional steel-reinforced cables with composite-core alternatives — improves thermal capacity, reduces mechanical sag, and lowers vegetation-contact probability.
Toward a resilience framework built for a hotter world
The review’s authors propose the Wildfire-Power System Resilience Assessment Framework (WPS-RAF), organized across seven domains: risk forecasting, infrastructure hardening, operational resilience, early warning, climate adaptation, policy and regulation, and post-event learning. Key gaps remain: standardized methods for measuring smoke-induced insulator damage don’t yet exist, and integrated models connecting wildfire behavior to equipment-level failure modes are only beginning to emerge.
Machine learning, remote sensing, and IoT sensor networks are converging as essential tools — predicting ignition probability, detecting high-impedance faults, enabling faster grid reconfiguration during active events. The 27-year arc of research makes one conclusion clear: wildfire resilience can no longer be treated as a specialized add-on to power system planning. Utilities, regulators, and engineers will need to build it in from the start.
You can check the full study here: Manousakis NM, Kalkanis K, Sinioros DP, Kokkosis A and Psomopoulos CS (2026) Wildfire and smoke effects on power transmission and distribution systems safety: an analytical review. Front. Energy Res. 14:1759856. doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2026.1759856
Author Profile
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and speaks Spanish, German, English, and Italian.
