Electric Utility Partnerships

For electric utilities, the stakes are high.

 Wildfires can lead to service interruptions, infrastructure damage, and significant liability risk, yet utilities have had few avenues to strategically direct funding to high-priority landscapes by sharing project costs and risks.

The Forest Resilience Bond (FRB) changes that. It brings utilities to the table with landowners, agencies, and other beneficiaries to advance forest-health projects around critical assets and service areas.

Through the FRB, utilities can proactively reduce wildfire risk, lessen the need for public safety power shutoffs, reduce liability exposure, improve strategic firefighting access points, and avoid costly post-fire repairs. In doing so, they strengthen both their systems and the communities they serve.

As a utility, the resilience of your infrastructure and the reliability of your service depend on the health of the forests surrounding your assets. Partnering with Blue Forest enables you to take meaningful action in the places that matter most to your operations.

We partner on restoration projects that are local to your service area or share a meaningful geographic connection, and are closely aligned with your primary risk concerns. Each project is built around the metrics that matter most to you — whether that’s reduced wildfire risk across your service territory, faster project completion through upfront FRB capital, improved firefighting access, lower ignition risk to lines and infrastructure, fewer outages and PSPS events, or protected ratepayer value. Underlying it all is a shared commitment to strengthening community resilience and the long-term protection of the people and places you serve.

Through science-based modeling and impact reporting, we help you understand and communicate the value of restoration to your organization, local communities, decision makers, regulators, investors, and other stakeholders. Our quantification work translates ecological outcomes into economic terms that speak to your operations, whether the priority is reducing wildfire risk to infrastructure or strengthening long-term reliability.

Restoration has long been the purview of landowners and managers, leaving little room for others who benefit from healthy forests to participate. Blue Forest brings stakeholders together, such as land managers, Native nations, utilities, NGOs, corporations, and government agencies, to build alignment and advance projects faster and at greater scale in priority areas.

As a project gains momentum, we bring additional corporations and utilities to the table, increasing project revenue and accelerating the pace of work through below-market-rate interest loans to implementers. This shared-benefit model is fundamentally collaborative. By bringing utilities, water agencies, and other beneficiaries together, partners share the cost of restoration while increasing the benefit each one receives. Utility participation is the driver behind what makes this financing model work. Without it, funding is harder to access and projects happen more slowly, if at all. As more utilities move on wildfire mitigation, the opportunity to join that momentum is now — reducing risk to your systems and your ratepayers while ensuring critical work doesn’t stall waiting for resources.