Some Alberta utility companies are testing AI-powered cameras, hoping the technology can help spot fires near power infrastructure before they spread.
In the Bow Valley, AltaLink has been testing AI-powered wildfire detection cameras since last June. One camera is located north of Kananaskis Village and the other just west of Canmore, Alta.
AltaLink says the two locations were chosen because they are considered among the highest wildfire risk areas along the utility’s existing camera network in the region.
The utility has 17 cameras along its power infrastructure in the Bow Valley that staff previously used to manually monitor for wildfire hazards. The new AI system automatically scans camera feeds for possible wildfire before sending alerts to staff for review.
Utilities have increasingly been exploring ways to reduce wildfire risk around power infrastructure as Alberta’s wildfire seasons become more destructive. Roughly 10 per cent of wildfires in Alberta are linked to utility infrastructure, according to AltaLink.
ATCO Electric said it ran its AI camera pilot project between July 2024 and February 2026, near Whitecourt, Swan Hills and Slave Lake, Alta.
The company said one camera detected a wildfire start last June. Crews got to the scene within 30 minutes of the ignition and ATCO said the fire was extinguished within an hour.
The company said a post-fire analysis found it would have spread several kilometres and become out of control if it had burned for another hour.
The cameras remain in place and are now part of its layered approach to wildfire management, ATCO said.
‘Immediate live feedback’
Scott Schifando, vice-president of operations for California-based ALERTWest — the company providing AltaLink and ATCO’s AI technology — said utilities are increasingly interested in the systems because many power lines run through remote areas where there may not be people nearby to quickly spot and report a wildfire.
“Placing these cameras in some of those more remote areas where a wildfire could ignite and sit there festering for a long period of time before a 911 call comes in makes a lot of sense,” he said.
Schifando said fire agencies in parts of the United States have come to rely heavily on the cameras.
“When you think about what a tool like this provides them, it’s not just early detection, it’s that visibility into a fire during the entire life of the fire,” he said.
“By giving those firefighters that immediate live feedback of what the fire is doing and where it’s going, we just hear about how much it improves the decision-making.”
Continuous scan of the landscape
The cameras rotate 360 degrees every minute or two, continuously scanning the landscape.
Those images are fed into an AI model trained using images of known wildfires. If the system identifies a possible ignition, ALERTWest staff review the detection before an alert is sent to utilities and fire agencies.
Schifando said ALERTWest camera systems have detected roughly 5,600 fires across the western United States over the past two years.
He also said the system can identify the start of a fire quickly.
Schifando said the system can detect some fires within a minute of their start, though that depends on how close the smoke is to the camera. If it is further away, it will take longer for the camera to detect.
The company currently has eight cameras operating in Alberta.
Potential and challenge
Mathieu Bourbonnais, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan who has worked with the B.C. Wildfire Service on AI wildfire detection systems, said the technology has potential but still faces challenges.
“There’s a lot of false positives. Clouds can look like smoke or someone starts a big truck and it spouts up a bunch of exhaust and that can look like a fire,” he said.
Bourbonnais said improving algorithms to better distinguish fires from other visual disturbances remains a major focus of his research.
He said Alberta is somewhat unique when it comes to wildfire detection because it already has one of the most extensive networks of staffed wildfire lookout towers in North America.
Alberta Wildfire said it employs 104 lookout observers across the province during wildfire season.
The agency said it conducted testing in 2022 comparing AI cameras with human lookout observers and found human observers were more successful at identifying wildfires.
Despite that, utilities say the cameras are intended to supplement, not replace, existing wildfire detection systems.
AltaLink said one manned wildfire lookout in the Bow Valley has a partial view of its transmission lines, but the AI cameras are intended to provide round-the-clock monitoring and automated alerts focused specifically on its infrastructure.
Shawn Reimer, AltaLink’s wildfire program manager, said the company is still in the early stages of evaluating the technology.
“But there was one instance of a controlled burn in the area, and the camera picked it up right away and alerted us,” he said.
Reimer said AltaLink ultimately hopes alerts generated by the cameras could one day be shared directly with local fire responders.
“As Alberta’s largest electricity transmission provider, our priority is protecting the communities where we operate while delivering safe, reliable power,” he said.
