How Utilities Can Improve Storm Recovery and Vegetation Management

There’s no end to climate change in sight – and that means utilities must brace themselves for a future of increasingly severe storms and other natural disasters. Just look at the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which caused record-smashing floods that wiped out entire communities in the American Southeast.

And due in part to widespread drought conditions, the National Interagency Fire Center reports that the number of acres of U.S. woodland burned by wildfires this year exceeds 2023’s tally by more than 300%.

All this means that power utilities must invest in advanced technology to minimize the risk of asset damage from disruptive events. Critically, they should seek out solutions that can be used in multiple ways.

Take GE Vernova’s GridOS® Visual Intelligence platform, for example. As we’ve discussed before, one of its key capabilities is increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of utility vegetation management (UVM) efforts. It overlays satellite shots, LiDAR scans, and other imagery with maps of a utility’s power network, making it easy for trimming crews to see the precise areas where vegetation must be trimmed to avoid asset damage. Visual Intelligence is a crucial component of UVM operations for many of the world’s largest utilities.

As you might infer, Visual Intelligence is most often used proactively – in other words, it is used before disruptive events to minimize the risk of damage from overgrown, dry, and/or dead vegetation. That’s perfectly logical, as two hours before a hurricane hits is not the time to notice a tree leaning ominously over a major transmission line.

But that’s not the only time Visual Intelligence can be used to help minimize damages. Many of our utility customers are beginning to leverage the solution to augment their post-storm recovery operations as well.

Consider: a tornado has just struck your service area. The damage is severe, and thousands are without power. Your people are actively working to get the lights back on, particularly their Outage Management System (OMS), which identifies outage patterns.

But you also need to assess the precise damages that surround your network and its crucial assets -- those insights help you better protect your crews and streamline recovery. For example, imagine the OMS indicates a large number of outages in a certain area. You quickly dispatch a crew. But they soon contact you and report that the outage area is completely blocked by a fallen pole and severed live wires. Your crew cannot even consider starting repair work until a crane or bulldozer can come to their location and clear the road. Until then, they can only wait.

Now imagine that same scenario, but with Visual Intelligence. Remember that you used Visual Intelligence long before the storm to eliminate trees that were getting too close to your assets. Because of that activity, you have a clear and accurate 3D model of your network under blue-sky conditions. Now that the storm has passed you can use those scans again – this time to assess recent damages and debris that might impede your recovery efforts. Before you send your crews into the danger zone, you use Visual Intelligence to analyze post-storm scans and identify the downed pole and lines blocking the road to the affected area. With this insight, you request a bulldozer to accompany your repair crews on this job. Thanks to Visual Intelligence, you’ve kept your repair crews safe and avoided any delay to your recovery efforts.

Now for a real-life, non-hypothetical use case. Take a look at the below screenshot from Visual Intelligence. It shows the area surrounding a marina (note the boats docked from lower left to upper right) just prior to Hurricane Ian in 2022.

There is a clear distinction between green (vegetation) and orange (infrastructure like roads, buildings, and boats). And best of all, the nearby power lines (in pink) are perfectly straight and parallel, indicating that they are intact. Everything is as it should be.

Now let’s look at the same area after Ian:

No, I’m not joking – that is the exact same area depicted above. Boats have been thrown ashore by the storm surge. Buildings have been swept away. The road is flooded. Felled trees are scattered everywhere. And the power poles have clearly snapped, given that the indicative pink lines are now crooked and/or missing completely! Visual Intelligence can provide you with specific insights about the damage in this area, which you can then leverage to expedite recovery operations and keep your crews safe.

Let’s examine another real-life use case. Take a look at the below Visual Intelligence graphic, this one showing a tree felled by Hurricane Idalia in August 2023.

Note that there is a tree (marked in red, orange, and blue) leaning precariously against the lowest power line, and yet the line is still intact (it is clearly straining under the weight of the tree, but it is nonetheless intact). No power grid disruption occurred here – meaning that the utility’s OMS neither detected nor flagged this damage.

And yet intervention is needed here just as urgently as if there were an outage. Again, notice how the bottom power line is sagging. Any additional movement and it could snap like a rubber band, thus causing another, completely avoidable outage. Thanks to Visual Intelligence, the utility was able to identify the situation and dispatch a crew to remove the tree before any disruption could occur.

As storms, wildfires, and other natural disasters continue to increase in severity and frequency, utilities need to get the most value from the disruption management tools they have on hand. Visual Intelligence is a perfect example of a solution that can be used in multiple ways, to both minimize the risk of damages before an event and assess damages after it passes.

For more information on Visual Intelligence and its many use cases, check out our new video on the solution.