Rebuilding for Resilience: 2025 CEC/EPRI Electrification Summit Panel Excerpt
VX News shares this panel excerpt from the 2025 CEC/EPRI Electrification Summit, March 11, 2025, in Sacramento, moderated by California Energy Commissioner Andrew McAllister, with panelists Caroline Choi, Executive Vice President, Public Policy & Corporate Affairs for Southern California Edison, David Jacot, Director of Efficiency Solutions, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, Minh Le, LA County ISD General Manager of Energy & Environmental Services, and Zac Swank, Deputy Director, Boulder County Office of Sustainability, Climate Action & Resilience. Drawing from multijurisdictional experience with wildfire recovery and rebuild, this panel of experts reflects on utility risk and resilience, considerations for rebuilding energy infrastructure, opportunities for collaboration and strategic investment in climate-resilient communities.
“While it’s easy to understand why undergrounding feels like an intuitive solution, we also have to consider the costs and trade-offs. Many approaches and technologies should be considered as part of the solution because ultimately, ratepayers, taxpayers, shareholders, and even consumers are the ones who bear the cost.”
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Caroline Choi: In the Eaton burn scar in the Altadena area, we had almost 20 circuits that were damaged significantly. So we are looking at undergrounding where it makes sense. Certainly starting in the high fire risk area, and then thinking about what makes sense in the non-high fire risk area.
Also, something that we want to think about is what the extreme weather events are, not just wildfire.
How do we make sure the grid is reliable, resilient, and ready for not just the weather, but for the increasing electricity demand that we see coming?
And, as we look to rebuild in the burn scar areas, how do we make sure that we're rebuilding stronger than what we had before, including increasing capacity where possible?
In Altadena, we had almost half a dozen circuits that were at 4 KV, the lowest capacity, and returning to 16 KV because of what we anticipate happening on the grid as we think about more electrification coming in.
We are looking to have a safe, reliable, resilient, ready grid. Things that are necessary to make that happen, we'll get into here. But what we have seen is an incredible amount of collaboration, cooperation as we look to restore services as much as possible. And that has to continue.
In the past two months, we're already seeing some signs of blue sky attitude, and we really want to make sure that folks don't think we're back at blue skies just because you can't smell smoke in the air. We are still in a crisis. We still need to move with extreme urgency. We still need to move with haste. We need the flexibility that is being provided by a major disaster declaration, where we can get waivers or move with broad plans and not with a lot of specifics at the moment. Those all help move our communities forward with speed.
David Jacot: …Director of Distributed Energy Solutions, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
To put a little bit in perspective, as far as the outside media and the national media are concerned, it's the "Los Angeles wildfires"—all in the city of Los Angeles. In reality, there were two main fires: the Eaton Fire, which devastated Altadena, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, and hit the eastern side of the City of Pasadena. And then there was the Palisades Fire, which devastated Pacific Palisades in the city of Los Angeles, but also the eastern half of Malibu, which is Edison territory.
So you've got three affected utilities— LADWP, Edison, and Pasadena Water and Power. And then you've got two cities, one incorporated town, and they’re all in LA County. If there was one accurate way for the national media to portray it, it would be the "LA County wildfires," not just the "Los Angeles wildfires." So we know this. They don’t know that. So we understand that the collaboration between the various jurisdictions is key. So we’re very happy that Minh Lee is here representing LA County as a whole, because that's the one jurisdiction that kind of wraps it up.
What I wanted to talk about from the LADWP perspective—this is fairly narrowly focused, but I thought this was a good opportunity to speak about resilience and what we really learned, tragically, unfortunately. But it really highlighted our need for in-basin generation with these wildfires. We're in the process of decarbonizing our entire grid by 2035. We have a stated goal and a city ordinance to do that—100% decarbonized renewables by 2035.
What you see up there is our transmission system. Most of our renewables—our utility-scale renewables—are out-of-basin, out of the LA Basin, and quite a ways away actually, where we own 27% of the transmission in California, I believe 9% of the load—a lot of transmission. We lease a lot of that capacity to other utilities. But the point is that that generation is out-of-basin, and so it comes to us via high-voltage lines. And those high-voltage lines are susceptible to going down in the case of wildfires. And that’s exactly what happened earlier this year.
The Hearst Fire took down the DC Intertie—the Pacific DC Intertie—because what happens is, those high-voltage transmission lines, normally, when it's just clear air, air is an insulator. Once you get heavy wildfire smoke that’s full of particulate, that becomes conductive and shorts, and that line is cooked. So it trips, it goes out. So we lose that. Any power we're bringing in across that line goes dark.
So, during the period from January 6 to January 13—a week period—our in-basin power plant closest to Palisades, Scattergood, ran six times its normal generation capacity versus the period the year before. Now, we're in the process of converting that power plant to use green hydrogen, so it will be part of that renewable source. It’s not going to be a baseload plant. We’ll run it when we need it—mostly be served by the in-basin renewables and out-of-basin renewables: solar, wind, batteries. That’s the main push.
But we still need in-basin plants converting to green hydrogen for when renewables aren’t enough, when there’s an emergency situation—such as these long-distance transmission lines going down for whatever reasons, including wildfires—and when we have to move power around the basin because we’ve got other assets that are under maintenance, under outage, planned or unplanned.
But I wanted to stress this—I know it's a little bit narrow—but I think there's a feeling in certain quarters that we can do solar, wind, batteries, and we don’t need [anything else]. And, you know, as utilities responsible for safely, affordably, reliably providing power to our customers 24/7, 365 days a year—that is not the case. And there is a need for [in-basin power generation].
We just went through a horrible situation, unfortunately.
Minh Le: Thank you. Good morning. First, I'd like to thank Commissioner McAllister and his team, as well as Commissioner Skinner for sending her team, as well as other state agencies and federal agencies that were able to join us in LA last month for an energy-focused tour of both the Eaton and the Palisades fire impact areas.
I'd like to raise some important issues so that we can have the difficult conversations. But it is not to say that I have the answers to those questions. In fact, I’m often torn because unfortunately, the reality is that there's really sometimes no clear answers to some of these problems—only less bad ones.
This is especially true when we look at the January fires in LA that claimed 29 lives, destroyed over 16,000 structures, and damaged another 2,000. I often think of the Chinese word for crisis, which is actually made up of two different characters. The first of those characters is the word for danger. The danger is clear. Our homes and neighborhoods were not designed with resiliency in mind, and certainly, the homes that make up the Altadena area in particular, that were largely built prior to the 1950s, never factored in the accelerating change to our climate and the risk associated with that change.
But in this crisis, as in the Chinese word, there is also opportunity. That is, our community members who lost those 16,000 structures mean there is an opportunity to rebuild 16,000 structures with both resiliency and energy efficiency in mind.
However, as Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley said earlier in the prior panel, the vast majority of people who have ever had the opportunity to even buy a home most likely will never have built a home from scratch. And so, there are great challenges in navigating the permits, all the questions that need to be answered in order to construct a home, questions that those homeowners really have no idea how to address. So there's a great opportunity there to help inform those individuals.
I want to bring up some data points here. The Woolsey Fire came through our area in 2018. Seven years after that fire, only about 60 to 65% of the structures that were burned and destroyed in that fire have been rebuilt. Which means there's another 35% or so that have not been completed—and that’s seven years later. We are in this for the long haul. Those homeowners, those businesses that are trying to rebuild, are navigating complex issues that will have profound and lasting impacts, not only on their properties and energy issues but on our communities as well.
The second topic I'd like to raise is really related to optimizing the resiliency of our energy infrastructure as a whole. As an engineer by training, I first look at what is the optimal solution for society as a whole, without regard to who pays for what. I know, I know—this is a very politically loaded and maybe naive way of looking at things. But as an engineer, I like to have that unique experiment, right? Because it helps me think about how our society can optimize and minimize costs associated with whatever we do. Because the reality is, there are limited resources everywhere. Then I work to inform our elected officials so that we can design public policies that match that ideal as closely as possible, recognizing the balance between many different competing forces and needs–this is especially true on the topic of undergrounding utilities, especially electrical lines. Undergrounding utilities is certainly one important tool to harden our infrastructure and lower the risk of igniting fires. When you look at the data, eight out of the 18 most destructive wildfires in California over the last 25 years have actually been associated with electrical infrastructure.
On the utility side, when we look at fires caused on the customer side of the meter, a large fraction of the most destructive wildfires actually have a clear correlation with the energy infrastructure. The last two major fires in January are not even included in that statistic yet, but we already see significant patterns. And so, it is incumbent upon us as a society to think of ways to minimize that risk.
While it’s easy to understand why undergrounding feels like an intuitive solution, we also have to consider the costs and trade-offs. Many approaches and technologies should be considered as part of the solution because ultimately, ratepayers, taxpayers, shareholders, and even consumers are the ones who bear the cost. On that point, I’d like to conclude my remarks by asking us all to think about the interrelated connectedness between home insurance, fire risk, and climate risk. Whether we like it or not, what we are essentially doing is socializing risk while privatizing profits.
Zac Swank: Situated in Boulder County, sort of similar to LA, we covered three communities: unincorporated Boulder County, the city of Louisville, and the city of Superior. We lost around 1,100 homes. We're now 70% rebuilt. So I'm here to share some lessons from that.
The Marshall Fire, of course, was a climate-change-fueled disaster. We had some of the wettest weather on record, followed by the driest six months on record, and the latest snow that we had ever had on record.
We organized just two weeks after the fire, already losing the narrative on green building and high-performance homes. These news articles kind of open the conversation about what happened next. We had protests against the 2021 IECC energy efficiency codes and against green building requirements in general. Around 300 residents came out and protested, which ultimately resulted in the city of Superior rolling back its energy efficiency codes and allowing homeowners to build to the 2018 IECC instead.
One year and a day later, one of the very people who organized the protest against those codes built to the 2021 IECC standard—the very code they had fought against. So, how did we do overall? This is our breakdown. As I said, we’re now three years in, and we are 70% rebuilt, which is pretty fast. Here’s how the numbers break down:
About one-third of homeowners built to the minimum 2018 IECC code.
About half built to at least the 2021 IECC standard—or better.
6% built ENERGY STAR Version 3.2 homes.
5% built Zero Energy Ready Homes, Version 2.
11% built ENERGY STAR NextGen, which is the all-electric version of ENERGY STAR.
1% of built passive houses.
That 1% might not sound like a lot, but for context, this fire recovery effort increased the number of passive homes in Colorado tenfold.
In total, about 20% of the homes rebuilt went fully electric.
How did we go from protests against energy efficiency codes to having 70% of homeowners voluntarily building above the code? Well, financial incentives helped. I was in an interview with our local media, and after an hour-long conversation, the only clip they aired was me looking at the ground and saying, “The money certainly helps.” And it does. Our incentives ranged from: $7,500 for meeting the 2021 IECC standard, and up to $37,500 for building to passive house standards.
On top of that, we copied your disaster recovery bill and created a state fund that provided: $10,000 for installing an air-source heat pump, $20,000 for installing a ground-source heat pump, and those incentives could be combined.
But financial incentives alone weren’t enough. We also launched a comprehensive education campaign. We quickly learned that we needed to shift our messaging—away from talking about climate change, green homes, and Passive House principles—to instead focus on health, safety, and comfort. We got a lot of feedback from homeowners saying, "Look, I believe in climate change, and it’s really important, but I just want my house back," or "It seems like you’re in my way."
We had to change the narrative: “No, we’re trying to help you build a home that you’re going to enjoy and feel comfortable in.”
To support this, we launched a dedicated website—RebuildingBetter.org, which is available to anyone who needs resources on rebuilding. If anyone here wants access to that content, just reach out—we’re happy to share all the source materials for the website.
We also hired a Passive House consultant, making them available for free to anyone in the community—homeowners and builders alike. We engaged in extensive community outreach, reaching out through local community groups, Slack channels, and WhatsApp chats. All of these efforts combined made a real difference. We have two years of lessons learned, but I’m out of time for my intro, so I’ll have to share more later.
