Climate change is a reality with live with today. Wildfires have become a lot more frequent with extreme weather and severe drought conditions on the rise. Jeff Pauska, product management director of vegetation solutions at Hitachi Energy, shares how utilities can improve their strategies to prevent wildfires with the aid of AI and satellites.
Six of the ten costliest wildfires in the United States have involved utility equipmentOpens a new window . The second-largest wildfire in California’s history, The Dixie Fire, sparked when power lines came into contact with a tree.Â
As record droughts and more extreme weather make news headlines, energy utilities must figure out how to deal with these wildfire-prone environments. It’s not easy.Â
The key to any utility strategy is vegetation management. Utilities must closely manage vegetation growth to keep fires from sparking. Yet it becomes an increasingly difficult job. Utilities face shrinking budgets and higher operating costs, making it more difficult than ever to send workers out to vegetation maintenance areas so they can analyze and address issues.Â
Years in the making, we’re finally seeing utilities use combined AI and satellite solutions to address this issue more effectively. For instance, brands like Louisville Gas & Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company ran a pilot project which helped detect vegetation infringements, diseased or decaying hazard trees, and nearby threats.
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The Challenges With Vegetation Management Technology Â
Every year, across the United States, there are over 3,500 unexpected power outages affecting nearly every agency, business, and citizen [2017 report, American Society of Civil Engineers]. The cost to businesses alone accounts for about $27 billion per year [Energy Central, “Businesses Suffer Serious Effects from Power Outages, 11/8/2019]. Nearly half of all utility-related wildfires are caused when vegetation is subjected to sustained high winds, creating a pattern of tree failure that is difficult to predict. Arborists cannot predict which trees will fail under wind conditions exceeding 55 miles per hour.
Even tree failure with 25 miles per hour windsOpens a new window is hard to predict. Consequently, any tree theoretically tall enough to contact an electric facility if it fails constitutes a fire hazard. [Elizaveta Malashenko, Former CPUC Deputy Executive Director]. Similarly, the bulk electric system has seen a 19% annual increaseOpens a new window in sustained outages since 2009 [NERC, Vegetation-Related Transmission Outage Report].
Most transmission and higher voltage distribution corridors carry power across rural, low-fuel moisture and untamed grassland areas that are hard to get to and are now populated with rate-paying customers.
Current inspection methods often rely on entrenched human knowledge, siloed decision-making, and “pen and paper†solutions, which hinder a utility’s ability to plan effective and timely interventions on vegetation growth. Current planning methods are time-intensive and often fail to capture complications and nuances of vegetation and terrain conditions.
 Additionally, sporadic requests for capital projects, invoicing, budgeting, or general information, occupy the majority of the vegetation planning department’s day, leaving minimal time for actual planning, not to mention hot-spot or emergency work!Â
Customer notifications/approvals, easement processes, and environmental complexities also require considerable time to sort through. This all takes away from the department’s ability to focus and plan work the best way they know.Â
Today, planning primarily relies on helicopter or ground inspections, which puts pressure on the team to get to the next problem since they are mainly looking for urgent issues. “Which ‘fire’ should I put out first?†is a question they often ask themselves, frequently finding that work is constrained by the location of their equipment and crew availability.Â
These workers frankly feel overwhelmed, under-budgeted/staffed, anxious, and even hopeless at times, having to repeatedly come into work with the same problems.
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The New Era Of AI and Space TechnologyÂ
A closed-loop resiliency system is a type of software that utilizes all monitoring resources to manage day-to-day risk management activities for wide-area, linear asset industries such as forecasting, planning, preparing, adjusting and reporting against prevention efforts.
Using satellite technology as a method of inspection allows utilities to cover and survey the entire territory to confirm line clearances automatically and maintain compliance with utility commission and federal regulations. The consistent orbit of satellites, intraday revisit capabilities, and minimal processing time provides unprecedented visibility into the environmental risks surrounding linear assets capable of spanning vast areas. Leading-edge vegetation management solutions incorporating satellite-powered analytics (the lowest-cost option on a per-mile basis) can instantly identify vegetation that poses a risk to the stability and reliability of the electric utility grid.Â
In tandem, the deployment of UAS (i.e., drones) and LiDAR inspections offer additional “arrows†to the departmental “quiver.â€Â
Closed-loop systems can push satellite insight to prioritize other inspection processes, which feed back-office planners, field coordinators and general foremen via mobile systems. This connected coordination enables field teams to immediately focus and direct efforts to pinpoint areas of risk during patrols, pre-worksite or post-work inspection activities, further assisting with prevention strategies.Â
While each inspection method has use cases for which it is best suited, only together can departments realize the true value of a closed loop system where all monitoring points bring together a new picture that fundamentally changes the way utilities plan, act and prevent calamities.
Adopting AI and Satellite-Powered Vegetation ManagementÂ
Today, federal regulations still restrict aerial inspections and UAS operations, and there are just some places you can’t fly or go beyond. Despite efforts to enable those capabilities, there also remain extensive security, privacy and liability concerns to their widespread usage.Â
In contrast, recently adopted rules from the FAA have created a more streamlined launch process for commercial satellites, which works synergistically with the trend towards more launches of smaller satellites to construct constellations. Rules and regulations promote the realization of value for satellite technology as an enabler for others.
Armed with robust, holistic vegetation management technology that provides analysis of data from multiple inspection methods, utilities can better assess the risk posed by vegetation, forecast its impact, and take analytics-guided action to protect their lines and maintain rights-of-way, which may include trimming rather than removal or deferral of trimming or removal until the next identified risk emerges. Such capabilities also enable optimal prioritization in work planning, coupled with detailed reporting on work efficiency and effectiveness, providing the optimized resource schedules that vegetation managers require to meet cycle goals and reliability objectives.
I foresee this technology helping all linear asset industries, including telecommunications, rail, gas pipelines, and others that need to manage miles and miles of infrastructure and assets and guard them against vegetation threats. We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of possibility by combining satellites and AI. What we’re doing within the energy industry is only just the beginning.
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