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 a well- documented direct cause of a relevant fraction of the most devastating wildfires in recent history resulting in significant damages being assessed against our customers, the power utilities, often to the brink of bankruptcy. The proposed wildfire monitoring system prevents the damage caused from these electric grid related wildfires by providing utility customers with a push 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 report fires in their earliest stages, before the forest is up in smoke, while storing images and sensor data for root cause verification. During Phase I, a functioning demonstrator was built and tested near power lines. A prototype software solution was also implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of several future improvements. We created a solution that can selectively relay the data from our device directly to a visualization portal, making it accessible from any web enabled device. During Phase II, the prototype system will be iteratively improved and tested to create a viable minimum commercial offering. Similarly, the software on both the field devices and on the server will be upgraded to create a sophisticated technology platform that is user friendly. Both the hardware and software features will need to comply with the regulatory framework that manages the deployment of devices on grid assets. The anticipated yearly benefits of deploying our system across 10,000 miles of conductor are: (1) peoples’ and animals’ 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 to 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.