Networked Powerline Monitoring System

Wildfires are a 47 billion dollars per year problem: They threaten lives while damaging health, property, landscapes, and the environment. Globally these fires are releasing substantial pollution and up to 20% of Greenhouse Gas emissions into the atmosphere. Electrical power lines are direct cause of a relevant fraction of the most devastating wildfires in recent history because they are often detected too late. This resulted in significant monetary damages being assessed against our customers, the electric utilities, sometimes even causing bankruptcy. The proposed wildfire monitoring system prevents or at least reduces the damage caused from these electric grid related wildfires by providing utility customers with a rapid notification alert, a picture, and situational awareness data all triggered by our Artificial Intelligence-based detection system. This approach ensures that stakeholders get, in seconds, the data that they need to confirm the issue is not a false positive. Unlike other systems, we work along transmission lines, sensing fire initiation below the forest canopy. We can detect and confirm fires by returning an image during their earliest stages, before the forest is up in smoke, while storing images and sensor data for root cause verification. During Phase II, the prototype fire detection system with built in Artificial Intelligence was developed and field-tested to create a viable minimum commercial offering. Similarly, the software on both the field devices and on the server were upgraded to create a sophisticated technology platform that can autonomously detect ignitions from up to eight miles away and report the visual information rapidly in a user-friendly manner. During Phase IIB, the minimum viable product will be improved by focusing on scalability while retaining the key capabilities useful to our customers, based on our market discovery. This effort will create a scalable platform that can support the production numbers of units required to fulfill our anticipated impact. The anticipated yearly benefits of deploying our system across 10,000 miles of conductor are: (1) peoplesĺ and animalsĺ lives saved, (2) 1.5 billion dollars from reduced direct damages and firefighting costs, and (3) 138 million dollars in reduced high impact environmental damage from prevented Greenhouse Gas emissions estimated at 1 million metric tons, or the equivalent impact of taking around 200,000 cars off the road. Additional applications will provide early warning for fire vulnerable communities, better target aerial firefighting response with picture validated fires, reduce the duration of economy-damaging Public Safety Power Shutoff events, and inform the insurance market with granular risk data to retain home insurance policies.