Vegetation Management
Improve service, identify hazards, and gain a more accurate view of vegetation conditions with data that pinpoints risk and helps you plan.
Vegetation management around transmission and distribution lines is vital to ensuring service and preventing hazards such as fires from arcing.
But relying on four-year, interval-based inspections by on-the-ground maintenance crews means that hazardous conditions can go unnoticed for months—or even years. And this could increase the chance of service interruptions, physical harm, lost revenue, and risk of financial liability.
Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data—often supplied by drones or planes—can help. But it needs to be overlaid with geographic information system (GIS) data and correlated with asset information. Until now, that has required significant manual effort.
Pacific Data Integrators has integrated both LiDAR and GIS data with the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform to create the Grid Health 360 solution. This integration gives operators the ability to overlay GIS, LiDAR, weather, and asset information to achieve a more accurate, current view of mitigation planning, and budgeting. With Grid Health 360, you send crews out only when and where it’s necessary, eliminating waste and saving millions of dollars.
The Grid Health 360 solution:
- Leverages LiDAR data to determine the proximity of vegetation to transmission lines, enabling utilities to prevent power outages, tree arcing, and fires.
- Uses automation to classify vegetation health, identifying problem tree location and providing a risk score indicating priority areas and hazards.
- Measures the degree of tilt of individual power poles and identifies poles that are in danger of falling and causing an outage.
- Enables you to prioritize vegetation management by producing a comprehensive risk score that includes critical health and social infrastructure affected (for example, schools, hospitals, nursing homes) as well as estimates of potential commercial exposure (for example the lost revenue per hour of outage and how re-routable power is within the grid).
