The 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California started after a 99-year-old Pacific Gas and Electric power line component failed.

Three years later, a fallen tree on a PG&E power line started the Dixie Fire, which burned for three months and destroyed almost 1 million acres.

Energy companies are now experimenting with artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology designed to detect cracks and flaws in power lines — before they turn into deadly blazes or turn off electricity across a metropolitan region, writes Peter Behr.

Drones have long been used to inspect power lines. But Department of Energy scientists and companies like Germany’s Siemens Energy are training AI models to analyze thousands of gigabytes of data per mile as the electric grid ages and faces more extreme weather threats. AI is also a potential tool as wind and solar power and demand from electric vehicles create new challenges for managing electricity supply and demand.

Siemens Energy has deployed helicopters loaded with sensors and AI models to find defects at grid operations in some European countries and an undisclosed Southeast utility. The hope is for the technology to assist in identifying threats from tree impacts with lines, electric current leaks and line components in need of replacement.

These advances come with big questions about how AI systems could be infiltrated or include biases that create risks to grid reliability. And that reflects an international debate about the risks and rewards of systems that act in place of humans.

In October, President Joe Biden issued an executive order that emphasized caution: Safety requires “robust, reliable, repeatable, and standardized evaluations of AI systems,” the order said, “as well as policies, institutions, and as appropriate, other mechanisms to test, understand, and mitigate risks from these systems before they are put to use.”

Designing defenses against these threats is a priority, according to grid experts at DOE’s national laboratories.

“There’s a lot of doom and a lot of gloom about the application of AI,” said Christopher Lamb, a senior cybersecurity researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. “Don’t be scared.”

It’s Wednesday — thank you for tuning in to POLITICO’s Power Switch. I’m your host, Rebekah Alvey. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy. Send your tips, comments, questions to [email protected].

Today in POLITICO Energy’s podcast: Sara Schonhardt breaks down the fight over an international fund that would help countries most affected by climate change.

Power Centers

Good neighbor’s day at court
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed inclined to rule against EPA in a fight over the agency’s rules for smog-forming pollution that crosses state lines, Pamela King and Sean Reilly write.

Leading the questioning in oral arguments for Ohio v. EPA today was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was the lead author of a 2012 D.C. Circuit opinion striking down an earlier version of what’s known as EPA’s good neighbor plan. States including Ohio are seeking a delay of the rule’s implementation, which a lower court declined to grant.

The rule has taken hold in only 11 of 23 affected states, and Kavanaugh questioned whether states, power plants and other companies were able to sufficiently weigh in on the rule.

“One of the complaints they have is whether they’re likely to succeed in saying that the rule was not adequately explained,” Kavanaugh said to Malcolm Stewart, the deputy solicitor general who argued on behalf of EPA.

Transmission turf war in New England
NextEra Energy, the nation’s largest renewable energy developer, has spent six years fighting a transmission project in New England, where it operates competing power plants, Benjamin Storrow writes.

Construction of the New England Clean Energy Connect power line, which would carry Canadian hydropower across the border to a substation in southern Maine, has been delayed for two years as the fight has worked through courts, campaigns and beyond. And a group working on NextEra’s behalf recently received the largest fine ever levied from Maine’s ethics agency.

“It just shows you that these companies are not fundamentally allied with the climate movement, not fundamentally on the side of climate progress,” said Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied utility opposition to climate policy. “They are just monopolies who sit on the bridge like a troll and try to protect their own profits.”

A spokesperson for Florida-based NextEra said in a statement that its concerns “stemmed from our belief that newly constructed transmission in the U.S. should support U.S. power generation — both new and existing clean energy.”

Californians get climate sticker shock
Democrats in California are feeling the heat from constituents over rising electricity bills tied to the state’s ambitious climate goals, Wes Venteicher writes.

The state’s largest utility, PG&E, has raised rates by as much as 127 percent as it buries power lines to reduce the risk of wildfires. Legislation to restructure utility bills similar to the state’s progressive tax system is now facing blowback from Democrats, citing its affects on middle- and high-income households.

“Californians are fed up,” Democratic state Assemblymember Marc Berman said recently in Sacramento. “My constituents are pissed off. I know because they told me over and over again at every community coffee that I had in the fall and in the winter. Their rates keep going up.”

It’s not just a Golden State problem. In New York, where utilities confront upgrades to an aging power grid and gas lines, lawmakers want to enshrine a 6 percent cap on rate increases for the lowest-earning households.

In Other News

Next wave? Oil-rich Kern County in California will be home to a massive carbon-removal project, hoping it will help create a new generation of jobs.

It’s a gas: Hybrids are rising in popularity, but are they green enough to save the planet? Some activists and regulators say no.

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Dan Brouillette, who was former President Donald Trump’s Energy secretary and now leads the Edison Electric Institute, said the utility trade group would defend President Joe Biden’s climate law even if Trump is reelected.

The city of Chicago sued six oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing them of waging a campaign against climate science.

The prime minister of Barbados said countries on the front lines of climate change should have their debts canceled.

That’s it for today, folks! Thanks for reading.

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