Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Inspection
Overhead Lines
Management for
 GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Today’s
Environment
Overhead line inspection is an important activity to ensure that electrical
grid assets are in proper working order to deliver high reliability of power,
while keeping workers safe and electricity affordable.

Assessing and mitigating risks due to aging infrastructure, wildfire, storms

and connecting Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) are some of the top
objectives of T&D asset managers. Knowledge management challenges
resulting from a retiring workforce as well as an increased commitment to
worker safety brings additional challenges and places emphasis on how
inspection data is collected, stored, and processed.
Today’s Environment

Typically, regulation requires that overhead lines must

be inspected with different methods in different cycles,
ranging from twice a year to every 15 years.

The management and maintenance of this infrastructure is more crucial than

ever and to support this changing environment, grid operators can no longer
rely on time-based traditional line inspection methods.

2
GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Reliability

92%
1 of outages on distribution systems are caused by aging
infrastructure, severe weather events and vandalism.

Aging workforce

25% of the utility workforce in the U.S. will retire

2
in the next 5 to 10 years.

Aging infrastructure

70% of transmission lines & large power transformers

3
in the U.S are more than 25 years old.

33% of distribution grids in the EU are more

4
than 40 years old.

Limitations of
Traditional Inspections
The challenge with the traditional way of carrying out line
inspections is that they are opex-intensive, as the process
is manual, time consuming and labor-intensive. Furthermore,
they can be dangerous and the quality of asset information
is often subject to errors and inconsistencies, and there is
usually limited visual documentation.

Even when utility companies have moved over to image-based

inspection, many still struggle to organise and efficiently analyse
the vast volume of images.

1: Infrastructure Report Card 2021

2: The aging workforce will retire soon. Is the utilities industry ready? IBM 2018
3: “Failure to Act: Electric Infrastructure Investment Gaps in a Rapidly Changing Environment,” 2020.
4: S&P Global Market Intelligence 2021

3
GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Our Solution
Empowering utilities to transition to virtual
and predictive asset inspections

Grid Vision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines is an operationally-ready solution

that is data-driven and provides a condition-based approach to infrastructure inspections, all
managed from a single platform.

Grid Vision Inspect utilizes Collaborative Artificial Intelligence (AI), a method for combining the
best qualities of deep learning, advanced software tools and human experts to achieve accurate
and consistent inspections, while automatically training the AI for long-term efficiency gains.

Reduced Reduced Increased Extended

Failure Rates Costs Safety Asset Life

Grid Vision Inspect enables a truly virtual and digital inspection process and delivers
automation from day one through the 30+ AI models that are already trained on over 3 million
global images. Human experts have also logged tens of thousands of hours of operational
virtual inspections utilizing Grid Vision, providing invaluable feedback to continually enhance
time saving features that allow inspectors to focus on the highest-value activities.

We help utilities achieve

improved efficiency, greater
accuracy and consistency within
their overhead line inspections.

4
GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Why Grid Vision?

Extensive proven experience Mature world-leading AI

• Partnering with 40+ utilities globally. • 30+ Al models for overhead line defect detection.
• 100,000+ km of T&D lines inspected. • One of the largest global libraries of training dataset.
• 3 million images annotated on overhead lines. • Over 10 years’ experience in AI.

Hardware-agnostic Purpose-built
Our energy industry digitalization experts • Designed and built by utility experts for T&D
have created Grid Vision to be decoupled powerline inspections.
from image capture hardware. This means • Our entire team of over 100 passionate professionals
we have the flexibility to work with any are 100% focused on grid inspection only.
vendor in any location.
• Easy to use software that is designed for typical
inspection workflows.

Built for scale Global partner ecosystem

Proven experience at scaling virtual Partnerships with some of the largest
inspections with some of the world’s engineering and data capture firms for end-to-
largest grid operators. end inspection solutions, and with Microsoft
as a close technology partner for global reach.

Collaborative-AI Unique asset-centric approach

Combines human intelligence with AI-based Our asset-centric approach connects data to
analytics to provide higher accuracy in defect assets and catalogs defects accordingly.
detection and increase safety.

5
GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Our Approach
We help utilities digitalize overhead line inspections by building a joint vision and business case
tailored to their needs, based on our global experience of delivering digitalized asset inspections.
We deliver our solution as Software as a Service (SaaS) or Inspection as a Service (IaaS).

In our approach we can cover the full end-to-end process from Plan, Capture, Inspect and Insight
depending on your requirements.

Inspection Inspection Results, Maintenance

Requirements Requirements, Inventory Updates

Maintenance
Management

Inspection Process

Plan Capture Inspect Insight

We work with you to We can provide IaaS or We perform virtual Grid Vision Insight provides
decide what lines to work with 3rd party vendors inspections and digitize users the ability to drill
inspect to best meet with our SaaS offering. asset inventories with down into inspection data
your goals. Grid Vision Inspect. and conduct conditional
assessment.

6
GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Collaborative-AI
Gradual automated inspections
Our software is powered by Collaborative-AI and advanced analytics. This model combines
AI and human work, and is incorporated in the core-process flow of Grid Vision Inspect.
The AI identifies defects and makes recommendations. The engineers review and verify the
AI’s recommendation. The AI learns from the engineer’s verification, and this is what we call
Collaborative-AI. The training of the AI by human experts brings precision to automated defect
detection over time. It further helps to create reproducible results, that are comparable over time.

Plan Capture Inspect Insight

Relevant inspection
Export & 5 data for future
inspections 1 Plan
Share

Improve AI
Perform Collect
Planned 4 with human
input 2 & Review
Work Collaborative-AI

3
Process
Data

7
GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Grid Vision Inspect

can be summarised in the following five steps

1 Plan
• Set the scope:
• Decide which assets to inspect.
• Define the type of inspection.

2 Collect and Review

• Collect relevant data from
various sources to optimally
perform the inspection.

3 Process Data
• Sort the assets.
• Link images to assets.
• Run Grid Vision’s AI.

4 Perform Planned Work

• Conditional assessment of power lines.
• Digitize assets (inventory).
• Human experts review suggestions
provided by Grid Vision AI.

5 Export and Share

• Export results from the inspection
to your systems.
• Relevant inspection data is made
available through Grid Vision
Insight for other users and future
inspections of the same assets.

8
GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Grid Vision Insight

Empowering teams with the right data
Grid Vision Insight is a web-based application that enables multiple users to drill down
into asset inspection data on multiple devices.

Grid Vision Insight unlocks additional value to the inspection process by empowering
organizations to make better data-based decisions for asset maintenance investments
and focus on assets that are a high priority.

Plan Capture Inspect Insight

Key Features

Conditional Assessment Interactive Map

Assess how asset has View assets and defects
changed over time. on the interactive map.

Customizable Dashboards
Collaborative Working
Manage inspection information
based on the data you need in an Share your dashboards
easy to use application. with wider teams.

Defect Report
View, group, and annotate on
results based on component,
asset type, severity or defect.

QA Workflow*
Annotate and feedback on
inspection results.

* Currently in development

9
 GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Customer
Case Studies
We are working with 40+ global transmission
and distribution customers.

Xcel Energy
Improving safety within current inspection process.

Partnering with EDM, Phoenix Air Unmanned and XP-RS to help Xcel Energy reimagine
transmission inspection, asset management and planning.

Solution: Grid Vision presents inspection work plan along with AI suggestions
to EDM´s Subject Matter Experts. These experts work in Grid Vision to audit and
augment the inspection results, providing the most up-to-date inspection results
and refining algorithms for increased accuracy. This approach is deployed for
Xcel Energy’s entire transmission system.
Case Studies

Benefits:
• Increase the accuracy and consistency of inspection and inventory asset data.
• Increase safety and efficiency of inspections at scale, featuring unmanned aircraft.
• Produce a baseline of data that will drive enhanced outcomes, including predictive
maintenance and enhanced capital planning.

10
 GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Customer
Case Studies

Axpo
Improving the efficiency of end-to-end powerline inspections.

AXPO’s Grid 4.0 program aims to accelerate digital transformation within their grid
business. New solutions are rolled out if they have success potential.

Solution: Grid Vision was used to inspect several powerlines as part of the 10-year
control inspection program. Several AI models were deployed including conductor
strand damage, broken insulators, contaminated insulators, flashed insulators,
cracks in concrete crossarms and cracks in concrete poles. The Grid Vision export
feature was used to create automatic reports summarizing the inspection results.
Case Studies

Benefits:
• Improved inspection workflow efficiencies by providing asset-based review and
automating the organization and analysis of images.
• Demonstrated potential for lower operating costs by using AI to assist subject matter
experts during their inspections.
• After a successful pilot, Axpo is now preparing to roll-out the solution on a larger scale.

11
 GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Customer
Case Studies

USA Transmission Utility

Testing the potential of integrating analytics into business operations.

A seven state transmission operator wanted to test how leveraging AI and machine
learning to analyze images could possibly improve asset health, business operations and
drive more efficient inspection processes.

Solution: Grid Vision was utilized to manually inspect assets and an R&D project
was conducted to explore C-hook wear problem. Additional training data was
provided in the form of computer-generated synthetic images of C-hooks.
Case Studies

Benefits:
• Demonstrated potential for lower operating costs by using AI to inspect structures
in a matter of hours.
• Provided an overview of the corrosion status of a chosen line.
• Explored the AI capabilities to detect C-hooks and C-hooks wear.

12
 GridVision® Inspection Management for Overhead Lines

Customer
Case Studies

MITNETZ STROM
Testing the efficiency of fully autonomous inspections.

Mitnetz Strom wanted to test the possibility of a fully autonomous inspection,

associating autonomous drones and AI-enabled image recognition.

Solution: The drone recordings were uploaded into Grid Vision utilizing API. The
inspection images were processed through Grid Vision’s Artificial Intelligence,
that detected defects on the components. The recommendations were shared
with Subject Matter Experts.
Case Studies

Benefits:
• Drastic reduction in time spent reviewing inspection data, while achieving better
detection accuracy.
• An opportunity to rapidly improve inspection processes and reduce costs.
• In the future, Mitnetz wants to establish the automated use of drones in addition to the
use of helicopters. The data will be processed with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

13
www.gridvision.com