37 | Andy Abranches, VP Wildfire Mitigation at Pacific Gas and Electric

In this episode of The UVM Podcast - Utility Vegetation Management , hosts Stephen R. Cieslewicz and Nick Ferguson sit down with Andrew Abranches, Vice President of Wildfire Mitigation at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, for a wide-ranging conversation on how wildfire risk has fundamentally changed, and what utilities, regulators, and communities must do to adapt.

Andy shares his professional journey into wildfire mitigation and explains how his role at PG&E extends well beyond traditional vegetation management. He discusses how climate change, extreme weather, and expanding development in the Wildland–Urban Interface (WUI) have transformed wildfire from a primarily ecological concern into a major human safety, infrastructure, and reliability challenge.

The conversation explores how PG&E’s vegetation management strategies have evolved over time, including the assumptions utilities have had to unlearn as wildfire science and impacts have become clearer. Andy outlines how inspection practices, prioritization, and verification are increasingly driven by data, remote sensing, and analytics, and what that evolution may look like over the next decade.

The episode also dives into Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events: what they are, when they’re used, the operational capabilities required to deploy them responsibly, and the difficult balance between social and economic disruption and catastrophic wildfire risk.

Beyond utility operations, Andy discusses the importance of coordination with CAL FIRE and other agencies, as well as the critical role of home hardening and defensible space in reducing wildfire losses.

A big thank you to our commercial sponsors Ryan Korpela, Chris Houska and the team at Celerity and Clear Path Utility Solutions LLC that made this episode possible.