The ten highest-ranked of California's small wildland-edge communities — where homes meet fire-prone wildland — screened as candidates for a self-contained local power island (a microgrid) on physical grid risk alone. These are the places where a local power island most reduces the harm from wildfire-driven outages. The full statewide top-20 follows as the remaining community research completes.
This screen answers one physical question: where does a self-contained local power island (a microgrid) most reduce the harm of wildfire-driven outages? The candidate universe is every small U.S. Census community (place/CDP) whose footprint intersects a CAL FIRE Very-High or High fire-hazard zone — 839 communities across all 58 counties. Each is scored 0–100 on four physical signals; the score is each signal rated 0–1, multiplied by its weight, and summed.
Wildfire hazard leads (35%) because it is the precondition — a microgrid for wildfire resilience only makes sense where the land actually burns. Power-shutoff risk (25%) is the recurring harm a local island directly offsets, so it is measured from real sourced utility shutoff events (PG&E / SCE / SDG&E / CPUC records), not a model. Grid isolation (20%) captures how much an island actually helps — a community at the end of a long single line gains more than one with dense grid around it. Critical facility (20%) rewards a load worth keeping powered (a fire station or emergency facility) plus the buildable land an island needs. Hazard and shutoff together (60%) carry the risk case; isolation and facility (40%) carry the can-an-island-help case.
Each community's county is assigned by Census coordinate geocoding (not hand labels), and the highest-scoring community per county is kept — geography-first, so the list spans the state rather than clustering in one fire region. That yields a statewide top-20; the ten highest-ranked are published here, with the rest to follow as community research completes.
Sources: CAL FIRE fire-hazard severity zones, utility/CPUC power-shutoff records, federal (HIFLD) transmission lines, and U.S. Census community boundaries — every external finding on each community is linked on the sources page. This is a physical screening, equity-blind by design: it flags communities for distributed-resilience evaluation, not a build decision. Economics, interconnection, and community fit are downstream steps.