How Dank Are Your Weeds? Inside A Portland Utility’s No…

Oleh Patinko • September 11, 2026

In Portland, Oregon, even the local utility wants to know about the dankness of your weeds.

Portland General Electric is launching a “first of its kind” wildfire research program that involves measuring the moisture levels in live plants to provide more data on how vegetation conditions can influence wildfire risk.

As one might imagine, this research will involve significant hands-on fieldwork, in addition to weather monitoring and the use of emerging sensor technology. The goal is to understand how much moisture is contained in living vegetation throughout the year. With support from NASA’s FireSense program and in coordination with researchers from the University of Idaho, PGE hopes to build a more complete picture of wildfire risk across its service area by measuring how live vegetation responds to changing weather, drought, and soil conditions.

PGE already has a suite of wildfire mitigation technologies and programs, including remote cameras with AI-enabled wildfire detection and weather monitoring through satellites and weather stations. While these systems are great at catching wildfires that have already started or weather conditions conducive to a fire, the moisture content of living vegetation requires “more hands-on observations,” the utility said.

“Wildfire not only needs the right weather conditions, but it also depends on the fuels,” said Lisa Kriederman, PGE’s lead meteorologist. “We’re trying to bring together all of this information, including weather station data, soil moisture, dead fuel moisture and now live fuel moisture, to get a full picture of fire risk across our service territory.”

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PGE contends that while weather observations, drought indicators, fire danger indices, and satellite products have been relied on for years by wildfire professionals, “they do not always reveal how vegetation is responding to prolonged heat, drought stress, or changing environmental conditions.”

“We are doing this to understand climatologically what we are normally supposed to be seeing in the vegetation throughout the season,” Kriederman said. “There haven’t been any historical measurements done here in the Pacific Northwest, so we saw this as an opportunity to collect this data and make it available to our partners so everyone can benefit from this missing historical record.”

As more and more data is collected, PGE hopes to have a fuller picture of what constitutes a “normal” season drying as opposed to “unusually dry or stressed” conditions. The utility is currently sampling live vegetation at 11 locations where it already has weather stations and soil moisture monitoring equipment. Researchers are tracking the complete annual moisture cycle, from spring green-up and peak seasonal moisture through summer drying, late-season minimums and eventual recovery after seasonal precipitation returns.

Inside PGE’s wildfire toolbox

PGE breaks down its wildfire mitigation strategy into a hierarchy of priorities. The long term is entirely about system hardening. For the short term, PGE focuses on improving risk management and situational awareness capabilities and improving detection of high-risk conditions and potential ignitions. Finally, in the immediate term, PGE can mitigate the risk of wildfire ignition in high-risk areas through planned Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) as a method of last resort.

PGE’s high-risk fire zones (HRFZs) are constantly changing – some areas are expanded, and some are removed as investments in mitigation are materialized. The utility said 2% of its customers live in an HRFZ, 9% of its overhead lines are within HRFZs, and 4% of its customers have experienced at least one PSPS.

PGE’s wildfire detection methods include early fault detection, weather stations, and AI cameras. To date, PGE said it has achieved 100% HRFZ camera detection and weather station coverage, and has installed early-fault-detection sensors on multiple distribution circuits.

PGE has a partnership with Pano AI, a company that uses deep learning AI and computer vision to automatically detect, verify, and classify wildfire events in real time. There are four main elements to Pano AI’s solution: high-resolution cameras, AI detection intelligence, human intelligence in the form of 24/7 analysts, and a utility-focused platform that shows a triangulated location of an incident and alerts emergency responders.

A Pano AI camera (Credit: Pano AI)

Pano AI’s hardware does best when installed at the right height, said Arvind Satyam, the COO and co-founder of Pano AI, and the cameras can be installed on existing infrastructure electric poles to meet this goal. The AI algorithm is constantly looking for smoke, and when it thinks it has found some, human analysts are alerted. The analysts can remove false positives dust clouds or chimney smoke, but if an actual wildfire has been detected, they then start to consider the right size of response.

However, no matter how high they’re installed, cameras can’t see everything. When a camera’s view is obstructed, Pano AI can utilize infrared satellite feeds to provide additional data, seeing where the camera can’t. These two systems work hand in hand and complement each other: when the infrared satellite picks up a heat signature, it can switch over to a ground camera feed to determine whether a fire has actually started. On the other hand, satellites can be used when a camera’s position doesn’t provide the needed visibility.

Learn more about PGE’s partnership with Pano AI from CCO Arvind Satyam in an interview at DTECH:

In addition to the AI-enabled camera system offered by Pano, PGE also uses smart Internet of Things (IoT) sensors from IND Technology. These sensors continuously monitor electrical networks to feed actionable data to utility personnel. The system remotely and proactively pinpoints common wildfire ignition sources to plus or minus 30 feet, said Andrew Ball, Head of North American Operations at IND Technology. These devices operate before, during, and after weather events, and do not require an outage install. Data is collected on site, sent to the cloud via LTE, then visualized for operators via a web portal.

The system is meant to make utilities aware of faults during blue sky events – the faults detected here are not as immediately obvious as smoke rising from a downed power line. Additionally, the tech is cheaper and faster to install than conducting vegetation management or undergrounding, PGE said.

How Dank Are Your Weeds? Inside A Portland Utility’s No…

Inside PGE’s wildfire toolbox

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