DENVER — The Bear Creek Fire in Douglas County, which was contained within a day, was first spotted by cameras equipped with artificial intelligence (AI).
Pano AI is a California-based company that aims to provide wildfire detection through cameras equipped with AI.
“We do this by installing high-definition security cameras on mountaintop locations like cell towers, and we rotate the cameras 360 degrees every minute, looking for the first signs of a fire, both day and night, using artificial intelligence," said Sonia Kastner, co-founder and CEO of Pano AI. "This allows us to push out alerts to emergency managers and to enterprise customers so they can take action and contain fires while they're still small... Some fires will show up first with the camera detection, some will show up first with the satellite. That's why we use the best of both worlds.”
Since Pano AI was founded in 2020, it's detected more than 100,000 fires, according to Kastner.
“The successes are the fires that often never make it to be major news stories because they're contained when they're small," Kastner said.
Pano AI's first customer was the Aspen Fire Protection District. There are now five Colorado customers, including Xcel Energy and CORE Electric, whose cameras first caught the Bear Creek Fire on June 16.
“We just started with Pano AI last year, doing a pilot program to kind of test their technology and see how well it could detect wildfire and also distinguish that from other sorts of things in the environment. And we've been really impressed with them," said Jordan Ambrogi, the wildfire mitigation program manager for CORE Electric. “Typically, it's within 10 minutes of detecting smoke, 10 to 12 minutes. Depending on where it is, how remote an area, it'll beat anyone else calling 911. Just the whole idea was to get that really fast detection on things, particularly out in the wildland.”
CORE Electric has six camera stations in Colorado. Xcel Energy currently has 28 active cameras and plans to add 42 more by the end of the year.
“We started that position back in 2019. That was a three-year plan," said Andrew Holder with Xcel Energy about their wildfire mitigation plan. "This is the new iteration of that plan. It's expanded to, you know, advanced technologies and strategies to help reduce wildfire risk.”
The first phase of Xcel's wildfire mitigation plan was filed in 2019 before the Marshall Fire.
The second phase of the plan would begin in 2025 if approved by the Public Utilities Commission. Holder said it is anticipated to cost customers $9 a month over the lifespan of the three-year plan.
