Optimized Vegetation Management to Improve the Resilience of the Electrical Power System to Extreme Weather

The reliability and resilience of the national electrical grid is a matter of both national security and quality of life. However, the grid is highly vulnerable to damage and outages due to extreme weather; a problem that is expected to worsen in the face of climate change. Storm restoration is a major expense for utility companies, with U.S. power companies alone spending on average $55 billion annually on storm response and restoration of infrastructure, a number that could be decreased significantly with better information on the threat of vegetation near vulnerable infrastructure. StormImpact Inc. will use NASA Earth Science data to build machine learning (ML) vegetation growth and vegetation risk models that will allow electrical utilities to proactively prepare for storms and improve the resilience of the electrical infrastructure to climate change. In addition, the NASA remote sensing data and vegetation ML model outputs will be ingested into our current suite of storm outage ML models. We anticipate cost savings of 10% to 20% for our utility customers due to improved vegetation management efficiency and greater power system reliability based on improved damage and outage predictions in advance of storms.