EDP Energy
Smart Grids, the digital transformation of electrical networks.
About the company
EDP Energy (Energías de Portugal) is an international energy group who operates in 14 countries; they are one of the main electrical groups in Europe, and the largest in Portugal. They are the leader in value creation, innovation and sustainability. They are part of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes and also a world leader in renewable energy. The EDP Group’s work is focused on the generation and distribution of electrical energy, as well as telecommunications and the area of information technology.
Challenges
EDP allocates a large amount of their yearly financial resources for the maintenance and management of their power lines. A large part of the budget is invested in the supervision and management of the pruning of vegetation that surrounds the power lines. This is done in order to avoid infestations in the easement area of the lines, which may cause incidents such as: fires or power outages in the power supply among other issues.
Currently, the management of this type of supervision and pruning work is carried out through inspection using a combination of drone flights and fieldwork, resulting in a methodology that is costly and very complicated to execute. On top of that, it is highly dependent on third parties. These conditioning factors translate into high costs and execution times for the company, as well as insecurity when managing these tasks.
The biggest challenge has been to create a solution that allows for the monitoring and to optimize the management of pruning and vegetation control tasks, reducing the execution costs for these types of tasks.
Solution
DOTGIS has developed a package of Artificial Intelligence algorithms for the characterization of the secure areas near power lines. Using satellite images, all this is visible thanks to a monitoring dashboard with different alert levels depending on the type of vegetation and proximity to the lines, which allows us to:
- Prediction of vegetation growth.
- Detection of the different types of vegetation as well as their degree of maturity.
- Analysis of the health status and / or diseases of the vegetation based on different vegetation indices (NDVI and EVI).
- Real-time detection of lateral and vertical infestations of vegetation in the easement zone, creating alerts before these infestations can affect the lines.
- Modeling the catenaries, generating a digital twin that allows the calculation of the free height between the vegetation and the lines, making it easier to distinguish between areas where there is no danger from others where the vegetation can overtake the lines.
ENRIQUE MENÉNDEZ
Innovation Project Manager at EPD Spain.
“Together with DOTGIS, we have developed a technology that uses satellite images to improve the management of the vegetation adjacent to power lines. Thanks to this type of technology allows us to identify different species of trees or calculate the height of the trees in the area. It is also capable of estimating the growth potential of the tree mass.”
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