WUI Neighborhood Top-20 — Microgrid Candidates
Wildfire-exposed California communities · physical grid-risk screening
Twenty wildfire–urban-interface (WUI) communities across California, screened
as island-capable microgrid candidates on physical grid risk alone — the places where a local
energy island most reduces wildfire-driven outage harm.
Scope: physical / grid-risk only. Ranking uses wildfire-hazard coverage,
PSPS/HFTD de-energization exposure, grid-edge isolation, and an islandable critical-load anchor.
No income, affluence, social-vulnerability, DAC, or equity data is used anywhere — candidates
are chosen on fire and grid geography, smallest-community-first, one per county.
How each community was scored
Candidate unit: a Census CDP footprint intersecting CAL FIRE FHSZ Very-High/High — a WUI community
a single microgrid could plausibly island. 839 such footprints across all 58 counties were evaluated;
the top community per county yields this statewide top-20.
Wildfire hazard
35%
FHSZ Very-High/High area fraction
PSPS exposure
25%
CPUC HFTD Tier-2/3 overlap
Grid-edge isolation
20%
Distance to transmission
Buildable anchor
20%
Islandable facility + land
Loading the 20 communities…
Portfolio synthesis — the 20 together