WASHINGTON, July 17, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rhizome, the world’s only climate resilience planning platform for the power grid, announced today a $1 million investment from Convective Capital alongside the launch of gridFirm (Fire Ignition Reduction and Mitigation), a groundbreaking product to help utilities manage their wildfire risk. Convective Capital is a venture capital firm funding startups building innovative technology to address the global wildfire crisis. The partnership reflects the growing demand for Rhizome’s technology following their pre-seed raise from earlier this fall.
gridFIRM is available for all electric utilities in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, and is designed to help electric utilities integrate wildfire risk in utility planning and allow for more effective development of wildfire mitigation plans. This will be the first standardized approach to quantifying long-term risk of utility assets causing wildfires and optimizing investments to most cost-effectively mitigate those risks. gridFIRM builds on top of Rhizome’s AI-based platform to model extreme weather-related grid failures currently being deployed with leading utilities.
“Wildfires are not just a western U.S. issue, they’re occurring across the nation and more frequently than ever,” said Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mishal Thadani. “Now, with new forecasts predicting a hotter-than-usual summer across much of the U.S., addressing wildfire concerns has become a priority. It is critical for utilities to be able to quantify the risk of igniting wildfires and what cost-effective measures can move the needle to prevent disasters and save lives. Convective Capital has a keen understanding of the challenge and our vision for addressing it, and we are thankful that they chose to partner with us.”
Utility-caused wildfires are devastating for communities and present the largest risk to the health of the electric utility industry. Over the last five years, investor-owned utility credit downgrades have outpaced upgrades as wildfire risk increases. gridFIRM will bridge the gap by helping utilities more effectively deploy capital to address the existential concern.
“U.S. utilities invest $200 billion in their infrastructure every year in an environment increasingly impacted by climate change,” said Bill Clerico, Founder and Managing Partner at Convective Capital. “In particular, wildfire ignitions have become an existential risk, causing bankruptcies, fines, and regulatory actions and costing the industry over $100 billion in the last 10 years. We're excited that Rhizome's new product gridFIRM is now available as a much-needed new tool for utilities, and our investment will help the company grow even faster and build a safer and more reliable grid.”
By applying machine learning to a host of asset, geographic, and historical datasets, the platform enables granular insight to vulnerability on an asset-level, providing an unprecedented level of visibility to the likelihood a utility asset could ignite a wildfire. The product was developed based on feedback from Rhizome’s utility customers in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and Texas.
“gridFIRM evaluates specific wildfire risk mitigation tactics utilities are commonly considering,” said Rhizome co-founder and CTO, Rahul Dubey. “The tool is specifically built to help utilities assess the effectiveness of investments such as insulating bare conductors, undergrounding, replacing aging assets, deploying reclosers, and others.”
About Rhizome
Rhizome is an AI-powered software platform that helps utilities identify vulnerabilities from climate threats, quantify risk at high resolutions, and measure the economic and social benefits of grid-enhancing investments. Rhizome provides the highest standard of equitable climate risk mitigation to ensure that communities and businesses are protected against intensifying extreme weather events.
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