As the U.S. Department of the Interior is making big plans for wildfire fighting, American companies are scrambling to provide technology and services to meet the growing need for wildland fire management during what has become, thanks to climate change, a year-round fire season.
So, if you were a government procurement professional, and you were vetting potential providers of advanced technological platforms designed to make fighting wildfires safer and more effective, who would you want to design it? Fire fighters … or fire starters?
Pacific Gas and Electric Company, aka PG&E, is a notorious fire starter. While their stated mission is “to safely and reliably deliver affordable and clean energy to customers and communities in Northern and Central California,” they have also proven remarkably effective at burning large swaths of the state to the ground through negligence.
PG&E equipment has been found responsible for several of California's most destructive wildfires, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. Investigations revealed decades of poor maintenance on power lines, leading to billions in liabilities and a 2020 guilty plea for 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Other wildfires linked to PG&E include the 2021 Dixie Fire, which became the second-largest in state history; the 2019 Kincade Fire, which forced massive evacuations in Sonoma County; and the 2020 Zogg Fire, which led to a homicide investigation and manslaughter charges against the utility.
The lawsuits and settlements against PG&E have been truly staggering: a $13.5 billion settlement with wildfire victims; a $1 billion agreement with public entities; an $11 billion deal with insurers; and as recently as January 2026, a $100 million settlement with shareholders over allegations that it concealed defective wildfire safety practices.
Anticipating all these losses, PG&E declared bankruptcy in January 2019, and the utility was placed on federal probation until early 2022, with a judge warning that they remained a “continuing menace.”
Fire-related litigation continues for PG&E to this day.
So, imagine that this particular company, with this particular legacy, decided to start a joint venture to build a wildfire prevention platform. It sounds like a great premise for a sit-com.
Yet this is exactly what they are doing.
In January 2026, PG&E, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Salesforce, and Wells Fargo, launched EmberPoint. According to their press release, it is a partnership designed to revolutionize wildfire prevention, detection, and response by integrating artificial intelligence, autonomous drone systems, and satellite data to help first responders identify and combat fires earlier, with the goal of curbing catastrophic wildfire impacts.
This, of course, sounds great. And that is the exact goal of PG&E’s initiative here – to sound great. PG&E, one of the most virulent causes of wildfires in California, is trying to present itself as the new wildfire solution.
But if you peel away the gloss, EmberPoint is not a solution at all, but rather a PR stunt – and even more, a covert attempt to make corporate interests rich using ratepayer money.
According to PG&E CEO Patti Poppe’s own statement, “In order to utilize the wealth of information that we’ve developed on wildfire prevention and mitigation over the last 10 years, we’re going to have to go through a regulatory process with the California Public Utilities Commission.” Put in plain English, she is saying that the resources PG&E would like to invest in EmberPoint are not currently accessible for that purpose – and will never be unless the CPUC allows it. And there are strong reasons for the CPUC not to allow it. This means that, despite all the hoopla, EmberPoint is currently dead in the water. But you would never guess that from the press release – that’s the PR piece.
The other aspect has to do with the nature of utilities.
Utilities typically operate as monopolies within given geographic regions due to functional necessity. However, to protect customers, governmental regulatory bodies (like the CPUC) monitor rates and limit how utilities can use ratepayer revenue to ensure that they serve the public interest.
Through EmberPoint, PG&E is seeking to squirm its way through that regulatory check. Their plan is to take ratepayer-funded infrastructure – 1,600 weather stations, 650+ AI cameras, 10 years of fire behavior data, and trained machine learning models – and contribute them as its equity stake in a commercial joint venture with three other fortune 500 companies, where all four parties would sell services to “federal, state, local, insurance and utility sector” customers. Ultimately PG&E and their corporate partners would be profiting from an asset that PG&E’s captive customers paid to build. All of this would happen if – and that’s a big if – the CPUC allows PG&E to do so.
In the end, the people of California deserve better than EmberPoint. It’s presented as a powerful fire prevention platform serving the public interest. But it is nothing more than a PR stunt by a negligent company who has burned down large swaths of the state, is buried under lawsuits, and is trying to convince its ratepayers (and the people suing it) that it’s not the public menace it so clearly is. And as if this weren’t enough, this public menace is trying to make itself and several other corporate interests rich off the fire technology it has built using ratepayer revenue.
Californians aren’t stupid. And neither is the CPUC. Let’s leave firefighting technology to fire fighters – not the corporate interests setting everything ablaze and asking us to thank them for it.
Allen Drew is the Northeast Regional Organizer for the Climate Witness Project
