Utility Managers Hate Surprises

In my non-work life, I love surprises. My birthday is in two days. I know my wife will surprise me with something terrific. Who knows, maybe tickets to an Eagles concert. My fingers are crossed. However, in my work life, not so much. This situation was especially true when I ran operations for a power company. I experienced too many surprises—bad ones.

How to minimize those devastating surprises? Here is my four-part formula:

• Know where your stuff is
• Determine its condition
• Identify threats
• Perform a GIS spatial analysis to figure out what’s going on

Spatial Analysis Kills Bad Surprises

Spatial analysis combines tools like being near things, placing a buffer around assets,  and overlaying a set of parameters on another. It also includes showing electric assets, flooding-prone areas, and heat and cluster maps. Using my four-part formula, utility managers can safely minimize surprises, mitigate risk, and sleep soundly.

Given so many changes to the business, like the proliferation of solar panels, EVs now demanding more and more electricity, and sensors everywhere, utilities must figure out how to keep bad things from happening, like where trees get too close to power lines. But, at the same time, they can not spend more than they can afford. Additionally, utility infrastructure is aging faster than companies can replace it, and climate change’s impact seems to worsen. Resiliency demands that facilities do not fall into disrepair.

More Information is Better Than Less

What bad things can happen? Power failures, fires, flooded substations, transformer leaks that contaminate sensitive wetlands, sabotage, cyberattacks, and theft. It’s enough to keep any utility executive up at night. So how do utilities manage these risks?

Insurance companies have always modeled risk. They understand a simple fact: the more you know, the more accurately you can calculate risk. For example, if insurance agents were to assess the fire risk in a building, they wouldn’t just be satisfied with statistics about the building. They would do a thorough inspection, look at maintenance records, check code violations, look for greasy rags next to furnaces, and document anything and everything that could contribute to a fire in the building. They would check the neighborhood crime statistics, gang activity, fire hydrants’ proximity, and everything around the building. They might even check to see if there had been any suspicious fires in the area. They would look at demographics for income levels and age distribution. The more they know—good or bad—the better they can determine the risk of paying out. The higher the risk, the higher the premiums. Simple.

Insurance agents are looking at both the condition of the building itself and the surroundings. So condition and location determine risk. As utilities attempt to mitigate risk, they also need more information. They need to think and act like insurance companies. They need to use my four-part formula.

Powerco Uses GIS Spatial Risk Analysis to Prioritize Asset Renewal

Powerco, New Zealand’s largest electricity distributor (by network length), headquartered in beautiful New Plymouth, serves over 300,000 customers across a diverse North Island geography. They leveraged their GIS to determine where bad things could happen to their assets. Then they used that risk assessment to renew their assets before bad things could happen. Powerco didn’t like surprises any more than me. Read their story here.

No More Surprises, Please

Utilities can use GIS to do exactly what insurance companies do every day. They can scour internal databases and the web for datasets such as lightning strike history, flood, wildfire zone, earthquake shake and high crime area maps, and real-time weather services. Utilities can see where a critical transmission line crosses a river or is next to a steep slope. They can assess areas where it might be easy to fix a transmission line compared to one where they need a helicopter. They can combine this data in a GIS to discover what parts of the system are more at risk than others and disseminate that knowledge throughout the company.

As more demands are placed on utilities, they must take the four-step process to build a data-driven approach to minimize surprises. First, build a solid system of record of assets using mobile-based GIS tools. These tools give utilities immediate access to information lost from the long journey from the field to the office. Second, capture as much data as possible about conditions, and model the threats. Third, perform spatial analysis to assign risk. Fourth, share the data and results broadly. Then like Powerco, execute an asset renewal program based on the prioritized risk profile.

Utility managers hate surprises. GIS tools lowers the number of surprises they get.

For more information on how GIS can lower risk, click here.