On November 15, the monumental U.S. Infrastructure bill was passed and signed into law by President Biden, securing $1.2 trillion to help rebuild America. The package includes $65 billion to update the electric grid and provide thousands of miles of new power lines. The question is, will the grid be “built back better,” or will it arise from antiquated processes of the past?
Our climate challenges, coupled with the starry-eyed goals of electrifying everything, will put an enormous strain on our grid. We will need a power distribution system that can flex its strength with resilience and be smart enough with proactive insight and technologies. The grids of the past will no longer fit the bill for our future climate goals.
As wet weather helps to bring an end to most of this year’s wildfires in the West, it’s not too soon to prepare for 2022 and beyond. The best place to start would seem to be analyzing the root cause of what led this year’s fire season to be one of the most destructive ever.
The prolonged drought appears to be a dominant factor, and one thing is clear: there is a deficit in the supply of transparent, objective data needed to determine the causality of wildfires and, with it, improve outcomes.
The conversation about the growth in the frequency and intensity of wildfires generally focuses on the effects of persistent drought brought on by climate change. However, it’s only a contributing factor to a larger systemic problem. As we know, the most common ignition event continues to be human activity - by some estimates, as much as 85 percent of the time.
However, a 2018 report issued by the California State Senate Energy Committee asserted that electrical power-related events were the third-most-common cause of wildfires in the state, ahead of arson, lightning, and campfires.
Given the increasing role of the grid in wildfire events, one would think that electric utilities would be addressing weaknesses in transmission and distribution (T&D) networks that most likely make them vulnerable to weather-related and other conditions most often associated with wildfires. Unfortunately, grid operators continue to lack data sufficient to give them precise in-the-field situational awareness, let alone to predict the likely timing of system faults that could ignite a wildfire. Without data, it’s difficult to determine in the moment if faulty utility equipment carries the potential to cause a wildfire. Additionally, after the fact, it’s difficult and time-consuming to determine whether wildfires may have undermined the integrity of utility equipment itself.
As government support for wildfire prevention initiatives grows, public and private utilities have a responsibility to invest in technology that gives them accurate, real-time information on what possible faults might be present and enables them to intelligently monitor on an efficient basis the health of energy infrastructure. With many utility companies' service territories spanning hundreds of miles over remote areas, power line monitoring is already an operational, costly, and time-consuming challenge. It’s made more so by the strain on available lineworker resources. It’s said that the average utility pole might only be inspected every ten years in some service territories. Advances in remote asset monitoring and analytics provide a new opportunity to convey additional productivity benefits in risk mitigation service.
Cause and effect
There have been significant investments in transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure across the US in recent years, but our power grid on average remains primarily generations old in age and relies on antiquated processes and technologies for its maintenance. As such, it is highly susceptible to environmental conditions. The stress posed on electrical systems by high winds can be intense; when extreme heat and drought-desiccating vegetation combine with seasonally high wind, it is almost unavoidable that conductors will slap together, transformers will explode, or lines will fall.
Utility companies have much to lose in this scenario beyond determining whether or not their equipment is likely to be at fault in a wildfire, let alone if it can justifiably be blamed after the fact. Forensic analysis is unsurprisingly a challenge after a wildfire. Once wildfires are in progress, they pose a significant threat to all aspects of the integrity of grid infrastructure. For example, soot from fires can accumulate on insulators that attach power lines to poles, resulting in arcing that ignites wooden poles. Furthermore, the insulation of air between lines is significantly decreased during wildfire smoke conditions, and arcing between the lines or to ground can occur. Fire retardants dropped from aircraft can apply enough force to crush an SUV and, therefore, certainly damage power lines or poles.
As wildfires increase in numbers, as is projected universally, the health of power infrastructure will likely continue to undergo significant damage. When hundreds of thousands of acres burn to the ground, the result will be hundreds of miles of power poles and lines being potentially damaged or destroyed.
California's Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) program aims to prevent some of this damage by shutting off service when high-risk weather conditions are present. However, for some utilities that program has become so sensitive to the risk of wildfire that the power is being shut off even when the risk of potential fire is lower. This conservative approach by utilities is resulting in customers experiencing a more “unreliable” grid.
It will take more than preemptive power shutoffs to address the risk of future wildfires. Utility companies face extensive investments to either fix damaged equipment or modernize the grid to make it more intelligent and responsive to the demands of a rapidly changing environment. Frankly, the loss of irreplaceable human life, property damage, and ensuing lawsuits are significantly more costly than the sorely needed upgrades.
Antiquated process
The inspection methods conducted in power line transmission and distribution are historically and presently "tedious" and painstakingly manual. They rely on workers to physically inspect lines and poles in person: climbing the poles, checking the conductors, the insulators, etc. Considering the remote forests and rugged terrain found in states like California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada, it is challenging to be proactive and preventative in these areas with manual inspections.
Aerial inspections also have a host of limitations. Mountain flying is hazardous to begin with, but especially in windy and hot seasons when the density altitude becomes very dangerous for low-flying aircraft. Drones are one alternative, but they require low wind and must be within line of sight of the operator, not to mention the skill needed to fly these expensive devices. A drone striking a powerline also runs as high a risk of starting a fire as a branch does, for the same reasons.
But there are solutions available now that utilize pole sensors and real-time analytics to improve periodic visual and aerial inspections performed by line technicians. Imagine that instead of responding to a fire already in progress, maintenance personnel or firefighters can be alerted to a vegetation contact or infrastructure-related hazard immediately, possibly weeks before a fire occurs. Imagine if monitoring the grid’s infrastructure health could send crews directly to the source of the issue instead of wandering the transmission line looking for the fault.
Infrastructure-related wildfires can be significantly reduced with real-time monitoring and data collection, allowing line workers and asset management maintenance technicians to be more precise and surgical in their approach to grid management and wildfire prevention.
Intelligent technology
Data analytics is the tool that the energy industry should leverage to take much of the cause guesswork out of the equation and hopefully prevent fires from ever happening.
The science involved in this new and evolving process is emerging and adapting from data analytics used in many industries. One way utilities can use this data is to determine how wildfires spread using multi-modal wildfire sensing. This feature can track the direction of the fire and collect and analyze environmental and microclimate data with existing and ongoing fires to predict wildfire behaviors in the future.
The technology used to identify and track fires can pick up readings from fires that are 100 to 150 feet away from the sensor. Since the sensors are placed throughout the grid, this allows the rapid identification of fires almost immediately, enabling a much faster response to existing fires. In some remote areas, a fire can be blazing for quite some time before it’s visible at a distance to the naked eye. Accordingly, fires could be much easier and faster to contain if identified almost immediately.
Over time, real-time analytics can develop a health profile for the grid and ultimately create a database of clues and indicators to understand and predict future failures. The cost of burying power lines is incomprehensibly high. In the meantime, we must track and improve the health of our existing grid and develop action plans for preventing future fires and grid failures by determining what is causing them, i.e., the indicators that they are about to occur. In this, shutoffs can be implemented with much greater precision, curtailing the root cause of wildfires before ignition.
As utilities implement these technologies, these analytics can go beyond health profiles and predicting faults. As the SEC formally integrates the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures into its public company reporting requirements, the investor-owned utilities will need this data even more to demonstrate to the regulators and the investment community that they have a handle on the challenges that climate change is bringing in the way of wildfires exacerbated by drought, hurricanes, rising seas, etc.
However, making the grid even smarter is a collective effort; one technology alone cannot solve all the challenges. It’s up to all parties involved in the health, oversight, and maintenance of our nation's electrical grids to do their part to ensure this infrastructure is updated to meet the demands and threats of the 21st century.
The electricity grid supports nearly every human being, and yet faces a huge lack of innovation. Many components and operational processes pre-date World War I. Not enough people are working to prepare the grid for the immense challenges posed by climate change. In fact, the fragility of the grid is now being weaponized against the transition to our clean energy future. We must innovate across all dimensions of this industry.
Tim Barat is founder and CEO of Gridware,a company that makes technology to detect power line faults in real-time to rapidly respond to wildfires.