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Saturday, February 7, 2026
Did You See What I Sent Earlier?
“I wouldn’t want that job”
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 Quarterbacks playing for the Super Bowl, accountants during tax season, postal workers at Christmas. They're all jobs that come with a fair degree of stress. But none have quite the same stakes of meteorologists working at utilities when the weather gets wild. Forecasters are on the frontline of deciding whether to cut power for millions or keeping it on and risking a catastrophic fire. Today's newsletter takes you inside one of the most high-stakes jobs in meteorology. Plus, your weekend listen and weekend read. You can subscribe to Bloomberg News to get all the latest on utilities and the energy transition. Making 'agonizing' decisionsBy Michelle Ma and Lauren Rosenthal States in the US West are grappling with an unusually warm, arid winter that is ramping up fire risk in some areas, driving utilities to take drastic precautions, including sometimes shutting off the power in a bid to keep their equipment from sparking a potentially ruinous blaze. Across large pockets of Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, fine grasses and brush that fuel fires have dried out as La Niña largely holds significant rain and snow at bay— a pattern that's projected to continue into the spring. As fire weather alerts from the US National Weather Service loomed in December and January, Xcel Energy Inc. ordered multiple rounds of preventative power cuts in Colorado for more than 50,000 customers, many in the Boulder and Fort Collins areas, reaching into the Rocky Mountains.  Inside PG&E's Applied Technology Services building in San Ramon, California. Photographer: Manuel Orbegozo The shutoffs, known as "public safety power shutoffs," are enacted so that during scorching, windy weather, power lines won't inadvertently spark a blaze. Those moves are deeply unpopular, but Xcel says they were necessary. Behind the scenes, Xcel executives were heeding advice from a team of weather scientists as they decided where and when to cut the flow of power. It "all starts with meteorology," says Paul McGregor, the company's vice president of wildfire risk management. Before he worked at Xcel, McGregor worked at Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the utility serving northern and central California. The company rolled out a shutoff program in 2018, building on an idea pioneered by San Diego's utility. Since its first proactive power cut, PG&E's meteorology team has developed a system that has inspired other utilities to create their own shutoff programs, advising how best to track conditions and design shutoff protocols that can be deployed quickly. In a control room in San Ramon, California, a giant map looms, dotted with transmission lines that cut across mountains and valleys. It's at PG&E's offices here that Scott Strenfel, the company's senior director of meteorology and fire science, along with his team of seven forecasters, monitors the weather and decides when the risk of fire is too great to keep energy flowing across the utility's vast transmission and distribution system.  Scott Strenfel at PG&E's office in San Ramon. Photographer: Manuel Orbegozo Strenfel, 43, is widely regarded as an industry leader in managing fire threats. He's also a weather nerd who got sent to the principal's office at his Southern California middle school for being disruptive every time it rained. Strenfel was working at PG&E in 2017 when the utility's equipment sparked a string of catastrophic fires across Northern California. Mounting lawsuits and public pressure led the company to begin rolling out preventative shutoffs. (A series of wildfires led PG&E to file for bankruptcy in 2019.) At the heart of their operations is data. The utility, which provides power to more than 5 million customers, now operates more than 1,600 weather stations perched atop its power lines in remote mountain passes, which report real-time wind speeds, wind gusts, humidity and temperature at least every 10 minutes. The company tracks how much moisture is packed into grasses and brush to determine how quickly they could ignite. In a daily meeting, Strenfel and his coworkers look at the AI-powered models, which consider both the probability of utility equipment sparking a fire as well as potential damage, and discuss the risks. The machine learning models make recommendations on whether to shut off power or not, and if things are "cusp-y," the meteorologists take a closer look. If conditions are ripe for a deadly conflagration, meteorologists monitor conditions 24/7 alongside a senior PG&E executive. How scientists make the call to cut the power is a complicated nexus of data, technology and human judgment. "It's a man-machine mix," Strenfel says. "Models aren't perfect." And making the right decision can be agonizing. There's a lot at stake: PG&E's neighbor, Edison International's Southern California utility, is facing hundreds of lawsuits alleging its equipment started the Eaton fire, which killed 19 people and razed part of the community of Altadena one year ago during a record-breaking windstorm. The utility later said it detected a fault on one of its transmission lines near the time the fire started. "I wouldn't want that job," says San Jose State University fire weather scientist Craig Clements, who Strenfel studied with while he was at the school. "It's probably the most stressful — and one of the more important — meteorology positions in the world." Read the full story about how PG&E is still working to manage risk and safety. For a weekly look at the market, business and economic impacts of extreme weather, subscribe to the Weather Watch newsletter. Risk around the world6.9 million The number of people in Australia who live in areas where homes adjoin highly flammable grasslands, raising the risk of Los Angeles-like urban conflagrations. AI maintenance workers"Even if the equipment failed, the sparks that it threw would have landed on bare earth. There would have been no fire." Andy Abranches Vice president of wildfire mitigation, PG&E Utilities are turning to artificial intelligence and other tools that can help prioritize maintenance concerns, including where to reduce vegetation growing too close to power lines. Readers really liked🏥Hospitals are kicking a potent greenhouse gas Your weekend readThe Winter Olympics officially kicked off on Friday in Cortina, Italy. The good news: The region received some snow this week, which should make for decent conditions for skiing and other outdoor events. The bad news: Climate change is lowering the odds of reliable snow globally, as the planet warms, especially at lower elevations. The trend is clear, even in Cortina. The region last hosted the Olympics in 1956, and temperatures have warmed 7C since then. Your weekend read comes from Laura Millan and Hayley Warren, who dove into the data and spoke with Olympians about their experiences skiing on increasingly artificial and precarious snow.  James Clugnet of Great Britain competes during a qualification event in Davos, Switzerland. Photographer: Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone At the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, about 80% of the snow was artificial. Four years later, in Beijing, all the snow was manufactured for the first time in Olympic history, sparking an outcry over the event's sustainability, as well as the Games' impact on local environments and global warming more broadly. The optics and images of ribbons of white surrounded by dirt-brown hills in China that were flashed around the world only accelerated the discussion, even if it was extremely cold during the events. James Clugnet, a cross-country skier with Team Great Britain, says that pretty much every competition he participates in these days depends on artificial snow—and that although it is firmer, allowing for faster racing, he prefers the real thing. He lives in Norway and trains on roller skis in the summer, which he says is similar to skiing on snow. When possible, the 29-year-old waits as late in the winter season as he can to start training on real snow, as cover tends to be deeper, lessening the environmental impact. He's not the only athlete concerned about the future of winter sports. Hundreds of competitors have been sounding the alarm through campaigns and in open letters to the IOC. Last year, just as the organization was choosing a new leader, 450 Olympians urged the IOC to do more to protect the environment. Days after being elected president, Kirsty Coventry said she would make those concerns a priority and later met with athletes to discuss the issue. Clugnet, raised near Grenoble, France, grew up near two winter resorts in the Alps—one at 1,000 meters above sea level and the other at 1,200 meters. As the years passed and temperatures rose, he recalls, training sessions moved to the higher-altitude resort; the lower one eventually closed. "That's when I understood the impact it can have on the sport," he says. "I don't really remember not being aware of climate change." See the data visualizations and read the full story. Your weekend listen Major economies around the world are grappling with electricity grids under stress from equipment bottlenecks and workforce shortages. What can be done to solve it? This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi talks with Manoj Sinha, CEO of Husk Power Systems, about distributed energy resources and their potential to bring electricity to where it is needed most — from energy-poor regions in the Global South, to energy-hungry data centers in rich countries. Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday. More from Bloomberg
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