GridOS Visual Intelligence Helps Avoid Power Grid Disruptions at Florida Power and Light

There’s no denying that severe weather events are becoming more frequent and more damaging with each passing year. That’s bad news for grid operators, whose infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to storm damage like falling trees, wildfires, and more.

This alarming trend has made utility vegetation management (UVM) efforts an increasing priority area for investment. This small, yet critical aspect of grid operations is a grid’s best bet at shielding their power assets from damage during the next major storm. Little wonder that utilities invest hundreds of millions of dollars per year in removing encroaching vegetation from the areas around their infrastructure.

Utility Vegetation Management strategies can be made more efficient and effective through the implementation of UVM solutions, particularly those that unlock proactive planning and increase precision. Florida Power and Light (FPL) of Juno Beach, Florida noticed considerable success from its implementation of GridOS® Visual Intelligence. Visual Intelligence is a software solution that overlays vegetation scans (either LiDAR or satellite) with geographical maps of power networks – within a single interface. This makes it easy for users to identify the precise locations where vegetation poses a threat to power assets, and dispatch UVM crews as such. Recently, Grid Software Vice President of Product Management Brian Hoff sat down with FPL’s former Head of Vegetation Management Iliana Rentz to discuss her company’s experience with Visual Intelligence. Here is what she had to say.

Providing power is a customer-based business. Utilities are the lifeblood of communities around the world, supplying the electricity that makes civilized life possible. Rentz praised Visual Intelligence’s ability to help FPL better serve and interact with its customers.

For example, Visual Intelligence helps FPL quantify trimming work, thus enabling them to provide customers with the most accurate picture of what work needs to be done in their areas, when it must happen, and how long it should take. This keeps customers informed and minimizes disruption to their daily lives (especially important when trimming work must take place in residential areas or on private property).

Rentz also discussed the role Visual Intelligence plays in its “Right Tree, Right Place” initiative. When green-thumbed customers decide to plant trees on their properties, their main consideration is typically aesthetics – not necessarily how each tree may affect power assets. FPL’s “Right Tree, Right Place” initiative is an awareness campaign designed to educate utility customers on the importance of proper tree planting, so that new trees pose minimal threat to power assets.

Visual Intelligence plays a role in these efforts. The solution provides FPL with a 3D digital twin of its network and encroaching vegetation. That digital twin can be leveraged to simulate certain tree placements and determine the safest possible location to plant it. It’s a valuable asset in spreading awareness of the role customers play in ensuring their power network’s safety and reliability.

Hoff and Rentz also discussed how, when Visual Intelligence was first implemented at FPL, the solution helped Rentz’s team gain a holistic, network-wide view of their UVM needs.

Often in UVM, vegetation management teams adopt a project-based approach, which focuses on protecting individual assets (e.g. a single power line, a single transformer, etc.) from encroaching vegetation. Rentz challenged the Visual Intelligence team to set up the solution in such a way that would accommodate her preferred network-based approach. In other words, Rentz wanted to be able to see how vegetation might threaten multiple assets at once, not just individual components. With Visual Intelligence, Rentz’s team can pan and zoom within the provided digital twin and identify vegetation encroachments for asset groups, such as interconnecting or adjacent power lines.

Having this type of visibility yields many benefits, but one of the most significant is easier prioritization of UVM efforts. For example, a rotting tree that is dangerously close to a point where power lines interconnect and branch off into multiple neighborhoods is an exceptionally high priority for trimming efforts, given the potential scale of a power grid disruption. FPL can easily identify such situations with Visual Intelligence. Rentz also said this holistic view is immensely helpful in scenarios like resource planning, reliability assessments, and cost modeling.

To view the full interview between Brian Hoff and Iliana Rentz, visit our YouTube page.