Man: The Academy of Sciences, Man: The Academy of Sciences, Engineering says that the two biggest infrastructure that human has built in the last century was the communication system and the power electricity system, and both systems actually started around the same time, about 140 years ago.

♪ Narrator: Our power system operates on 3 fundamental components--generation, where electricity is produced; consumption, where it's used in homes and businesses; and the grid that connects them, transporting energy across vast distances.

The traditional grid relies heavily on centralized fossil-fuel generators, like coal and natural gas plants.

These facilities feed electricity into high-voltage transmission lines that carry power across hundreds of miles to substations.

There, transformers reduce the voltage to levels appropriate for local distribution networks that serve our communities.

This conventional architecture, while efficient, contains inherent vulnerabilities at two critical points.

If a power plant stops generating electricity or if transmission infrastructure, such as towers or transformers, becomes damaged or disconnected, entire regions can lose power.

These single points of failure reveal the limitations of a system that wasn't designed with resilience against climate change in mind.

Southern California's historically mild climate has changed significantly since the first power lines were built across the state.

Climate change has diminished the protective fog and mist along the coast and reduced annual rainfall.

♪ Marrone: You know, you have the electrical infrastructure.

You have the water infrastructure.

Are the homes hardened against wildfire?

Are you able to manage the forests and the wildland and do fuels reduction?

Because what we've effectively done is remove fire from the natural environment that existed 150 or 200 years ago here in Los Angeles County.

Mother Nature would thin the forests and thin the wildland naturally.

We don't allow that to occur anymore.

Because we have people living adjacent to the wildland areas, we now effectively put out every brush fire that starts.

You don't have the clearing that you used to have 200 years ago, when the fire would naturally move through the mountains.

We just came off the hottest year in Los Angeles County.

We had low fuel moistures and no rain for 8 months.

Conditions were ripe for a wildfire, but none of us knew that the conditions were right for a community conflagration because we've never been challenged like this.

[Flames crackle]