Europe’s Wildfire Wake-Up Call: Why Grid Operators Are Looking to Space

Spain’s 2026 wildfire season has confirmed that extreme fire risk is no longer a problem confined to California or Australia. The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) recorded that 295,720 hectares of land burned in Spain between January 1 and September 2. On July 23, the Spanish government declared a national emergency in response to the severity and simultaneity of large fires, with more than 100,000 people evacuated or instructed to stay indoors. This followed a 2025 season that was already Spain’s worst for burned land in over three decades.

The space sector is responding to mounting wildfire impacts

European Space Agency (ESA) InCubed and the Spanish Space Agency (AEE) have co-funded eight Earth observation (EO) projects, worth a combined €3 million, to improve how wildfires are anticipated, detected and managed. The portfolio spans the full fire cycle:

• FirEOcast (led by isardSAT) and FireTwin (Agresta) combine satellite-derived fuel data with meteorological modelling to produce more dynamic fire-danger forecasts.
• FIREWISE (ARQUIMEA Research Centre) runs AI models onboard satellites to cut the time between observation and alert.
• Telespazio Ibérica’s PiroSAR uses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to track fire fronts through smoke, cloud and darkness.

The projects are framed around the needs of emergency managers rather than network operators. But the capabilities they are building – fuel and fire-danger forecasting, near-real-time detection and all-weather monitoring – map directly onto the wildfire problem facing grid owners, whose overhead lines cross the rural, forested terrain most at risk. Spanish utilities are already responding to this. In June 2026, Iberdrola selected ICEYE through its PERSEO open innovation programme for a pilot in Spain that uses SAR satellites to anticipate and track floods, wildfires and high winds, assess damage rapidly, and deploy repair crews to the most affected assets. Iberdrola plans to extend the technology to the US and Australia – markets where wildfire has long shaped how networks are operated.

In Verdantix’s view, this marks the start of Europe’s shift from reactive to proactive wildfire resilience

In the western US, utility-caused ignitions and the resulting liability exposure turned wildfire into a board-level issue, driving investment in weather stations, line sensors, camera networks, vegetation analytics and risk modelling, and making pre-emptive de-energization a standard operating tool. European utilities have not faced the same regulatory and legal forcing function, so wildfire has largely been treated as an emergency response and restoration problem. Consecutive extreme seasons in Spain are changing that calculus. We expect three developments over the next few years:

• Wildfire risk becomes a planning input and not just an operational alert.

  Utilities will use dynamic, satellite-derived fire-danger and fuel data to prioritize vegetation management, network hardening and undergrounding by line segment, rather than relying on static risk maps and fixed inspection cycles.

• EO joins the grid monitoring stack.

  Satellite data will not replace line sensors, drones or LiDAR surveys, but will provide the wide-area, all-weather situational layer that ties them together – particularly for long rural feeders where dense sensor deployments are not economically efficient.

• Space vendors will compete for utility budgets.
  Firms such as Airbus, ICEYE, Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space are building wildfire intelligence primarily for public authorities. The commercial opportunity lies in translating this into asset-level risk insights that integrate with utilities’ GIS, outage management and work management systems.

For grid operators in Southern Europe, the message is clear: wildfire resilience can no longer be addressed only once the fire season starts. Utilities should map wildfire exposure across their networks now, run pilots with clearly defined operational KPIs – such as alert lead time or restoration speed – and assess how satellite intelligence will feed existing grid monitoring and decision-support workflows. Verdantix’s digital grid technologies research is tracking the grid monitoring market and will continue to assess how EO-based capabilities are adopted by network operators. To read more, check out our Smart Innovators: Grid Monitoring And Analytics.