ASK THE EXPERT: Aerial Sensing Charges Up Asset Management

The integration of renewable energy into aging grids, a workforce in flux, and a changing climate are just a few of the challenges the utility sector faces. However, the industry has demonstrated impressive agility, incorporating cutting-edge technologies like aerial and remote sensing into its business operations and adding predictive maintenance to its list of proactive policies.

Visual data management tools are powerful enablers of aerial sensing, helping utilities collect, sort and make sense of data to optimize maintenance strategies. Jay Jenkins, vice president of solutions at Cyberhawk™, shares how visual data management tools — in concert with aerial and remote sensing — can charge up utilities’ operations for the better.

What challenges do today’s utilities face, and what does the landscape look like?

Utilities are continuously being pushed to deliver improved levels of service. Unfortunately, they’re working with aging legacy infrastructure, increasingly unpredictable environmental conditions, and changing regulations, all of which lead to uncharted territory. This is especially hard to navigate, given that many industry experts are nearing retirement. Electrification is adding new stressors. We’re asking the grid to do things beyond its original abilities. But if we’re going to meet electrification targets, the industry will have to tackle these challenges head-on.

How is remote aerial sensing changing asset management and helping utilities be more proactive than reactive?

First and foremost, remote sensing keeps people out of harm’s way by enabling utilities to perform tasks that would otherwise require humans to be in hazardous situations. Aerial sensing also offers a step change in the fidelity and quality of an asset inspection, meaning utilities can be more confident about the information they feed into their overall asset management strategy. 

Utilities are already seeing great results from using IIoT as a form of remote sensing to perform predictive maintenance on certain equipment classes like transformers and circuit breakers. Aerial inspections provide a similar step change for other infrastructure where aerial techniques are more appropriate — which is the case for a lot of utility infrastructure, especially transmission and distribution. Utilities can identify issues that traditional inspection methods might otherwise miss. Just as important, higher quality inspections also enable utilities to better know when not to repair or replace assets, which can drive huge savings.

Aerial inspections also improve the productivity of scarce SME resources. Traditional inspections deploy SMEs and linemen to assets in the field, which means unproductive travel time. With remote sensing, you can have SME resources perform inspections across many assets without the need to travel. This improved productivity combats some of the workforce-related challenges that utilities are battling.

Could you expand on how aerial sensing improves the quality of inspections?

Aerial sensing helps utilities gain a more comprehensive and clear view of assets, as compared to the often limited perspective that traditional ground-based inspections provide. Aerial sensing also gives you dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of very high-resolution pictures that can be reviewed by multiple people for a much more thorough inspection, instead of just a few images that standard inspections typically deliver. 

Why do utilities need visual data management tools in concert with remote sensing data?

Visual data management software is key to enabling aerial inspection programs. Consider some key challenges utilities encounter as they introduce these programs. There are difficulties in organizing the data, new requirements for inspecting images of assets rather than the asset itself, and potential misalignment or lack of integration with the rest of the business strategy.

Let’s talk about the organization of data. If you think about the scale of utilities, which may manage millions of assets,  able to find information quickly. There are a lot of challenges involved with properly organizing data and associating it with the right assets to enable downstream processes. Another advantage of visual data management tools is that they facilitate how aerial sensing-based inspections are done — on images. These tools provide techniques like image annotation and classification to work with the immense volume of images these programs generate. Visual data management tools also leverage emerging technologies in AI to automate image classification and defect identification to further improve SME productivity.

Advanced visual data management systems enable business process data to integrate with other critical systems in the enterprise IT tech stack. By doing so, these tools help aerial inspection methods to scale.

What kind of infrastructure do utilities need to have in place to really make the most of these tools?

Most of these solutions are cloud-based, so there are little to no hard infrastructure requirements. But from an organizational perspective, working with a cross-functional stakeholder group is key to maximizing value. While these programs and the associated tools address a primary objective to enable aerial inspection programs, they also have broad collateral benefits. Other departments, such as vegetation management teams, benefit from an open, easy-to-navigate repository of recent, high-resolution imagery of their system provided by these tools.

What excites you about the future of the utilities industry?

Utilities are essential to our future, so there’s always a forcing function and drive to innovate and do things better. I’m also encouraged by the level to which organizations share experiences and best practices for the benefit of the utilities industry as a whole.