S26 GIRS Seminars: Climate-Adaptive Wildfire Risk Modeling for Electrical Grid Safety Planning

📅 When: Thursday, May 28, 2026
🕐 Time: 1:00–2:00 PM PT
📍 Where: (In-Person) Engineering 6 Building, Room 580B and 💻 ZOOM

Alexandre Guinand, PhD Student

headshot of Alexandre Guinand

Abstract: Anthropogenic climate change is structurally shifting the baseline of wildfire drivers across California. Trained on historical climate data and limited to short forward horizons, current risk models are increasingly inadequate for long-term infrastructure planning. At the same time, electrical grid infrastructure is not merely a passive recipient of wildfire consequences but a primary ignition source, creating a bidirectional feedback that existing frameworks systematically neglect. This presentation offers a structured literature review organized around this bidirectional framing, surveying the state of the art across two complementary modeling ecosystems: the long-term wildfire projection stack developed by the Pyregence Consortium, which combines CMIP6-downscaled climate projections with statistical fire simulation models to produce scenario-conditioned risk distributions through 2100, and the utility-scale wildfire risk framework deployed by PG&E, which quantifies ignition probability and downstream consequences at the asset level but assumes climatic stationarity. By mapping the architecture, data dependencies, and limitations of both ecosystems side by side, this review tries to identify the key integration points needed to build a climate-adaptive, bidirectional wildfire risk modeling framework suited to the long-term infrastructure planning horizon.

Short Bio: Alexandre Guinand is a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, working under the supervision of Dr. Enrique López Droguett. He holds a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an Engineering degree from ESTP Paris, where he specialized in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering.

Alexandre is affiliated with the B. John Garrick Institute for Risk Sciences at UCLA. His research focuses on developing computational and probabilistic decision-support tools for complex energy and environmental systems. His current work includes a CEC-funded wildfire risk project, which aims to integrate climate projections, large-scale simulation models, and probabilistic risk assessment to support long-term decision-making and resilience planning at regional and infrastructure network scales.