Climate-driven wildfires are increasingly ignited by overhead power lines, prompting utilities to deploy preemptive Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). Equitably Allocating Wildfire Resilience Investments for Power Grids studies how the Biden Administration’s Justice40 mandate (40 % of federal infrastructure benefits to disadvantaged communities via the CEJST index) actually plays out in a Texas case study using a high-fidelity synthetic ERCOT grid. EPIcenter affiliate Dan Molzahn and coauthors show that traditional vulnerability indices (CEJST, SVI) often “average out” minority groups—specifically Indigenous Texans—so that these communities remain disproportionately burdened by outages even when 40 % of undergrounding funds are nominally directed to “vulnerable” tracts. By contrast, a Min–Max Fairness (MMF) approach that explicitly minimizes the maximum percentage of load shed for any racial/income group ensures that the most affected group (Indigenous) sees real improvement, albeit at the cost of an increase in overall load shed (0.33 % → 0.41 % at $1 B). This work highlights the “curse of aggregation” inherent in one-size-fits-all indices, arguing for group-size conscious fairness constraints or more granular, context-specific vulnerability metrics to achieve true equity in climate resilience investments.
This summary was written with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot on July 4th, 2025. Its content was edited and verified by EPIcenter staff and affiliates.
Read the full paper: https://molzahn.github.io/pubs/pollack_piansky_gupta_molzahn-wildfire_fairness.pdf