Beyond the devastating and tragic loss of life, property, and general sense of security, the January 2025 LA firestorms also revealed deep, systemic vulnerabilities in Southern California’s critical energy and water infrastructure.
This reality stands as an important challenge for the nation’s largest municipal utility—the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—as well as for utilities across the country and the world as they plan for a future where critical infrastructure must withstand evolving stressors from a changing climate.
To tackle that challenge, LADWP commissioned UCLA—through its long-standing partnership with the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge (SLAGC)—to bring together UCLA’s leading subject matter experts, high-level industry decision-makers at the cutting edge of innovation in water and energy infrastructure, and leadership from multiple regional utilities.
The goal: advance knowledge of and efficient investment in emerging technologies that address challenges in four critical areas—Utility Undergrounding, Advanced Metering Infrastructure for Power and Water, Water Infrastructure and Climate Resilience, and Wildfire Risk Assessment.
To accomplish this, SLAGC joined forces with Gregory Pierce, Research and Co-Executive Director of UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation. Pierce’s team worked closely with LADWP and SLAGC to roadmap key topics and subjects to explore and for which UCLA could organize the proper expertise, developing a program that would generate robust and action-oriented discussion.
Mobilizing—and organizing—the relevant expertise from across UCLA and other research institutions.
SLAGC leveraged its relationships and knowledge of the academic landscape to identify and recruit the right team for this work, bringing together key UCLA experts in engineering, water infrastructure, climate science, risk science, community engagement, and urban planning, as well as representatives from research institutions such as EPRI, NREL, and Headwaters Economics.
This was key to grounding the workshop in cutting-edge and relevant knowledge while also providing a forum for the free exchange of ideas between utilities, private sector leaders, and academic experts.
Planning and executing an outcomes-oriented program
It was essential to the event’s success that it be designed to efficiently and effectively leverage the time and knowledge of the VIPs present.
That meant securing a neutral venue and laying the ground rules that would allow attendees to be able to engage each other and the topics candidly. It also meant working with Pierce’s team to develop and disseminate preparatory materials that helped focus attendees attention on the critical topics. As the SLAGC team worked to recruit subject matter experts, they also worked closely with these experts to help prepare them to steer breakout sessions and guide the conversations into realistic, research-grounded, solutions-oriented directions.
The day-long event drew more than 100 participants, who explored potential future opportunities, ranging from new technologies to future federal funding availability. These discussions centered on strategies to overcome challenges arising from regulatory complexity and coordination issues, cost barriers, skills and capacity gaps, public buy-in especially around rate increases, and validating yet-unproven technologies.
What comes next?
Following the fires, there is a window of opportunity to build on increased political will and public support for infrastructure improvement, especially when leaders are able to credibly demonstrate that these improvements will benefit the impacted communities and that processes for those improvements will be transparent.
LADWP recently put out a Request for Information (RFI)—a broader survey of industry leaders— to invite additional input on technology solutions for power system modernization and resilience, building on the work accomplished at the workshop to refine the potential scope of future public-private partnership efforts.
The UCLA team is also preparing to publish a more detailed report of the discussions at the workshop, drilling into important learnings that can be broadly applicable and advance knowledge around innovation and infrastructure improvement.
Stay tuned and sign up for SLAGC’s newsletter for further updates.
