Challenges posed by climate change

Much has been said and written about the impact of climate change and global warming on life and earth in recent years.

Reports state that climate change could wipe off up to 18% of global economic gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. While these may appear as doomsday scenarios, the utilities and energy sector has been dealing with the increasing impact and frequency of natural disasters and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, typhoons, heatwaves, wild-fires, and storms.

Some recent instances include:

• Power outages in Texas owing to the ‘Big Freeze’ event in February 2021; the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) implemented rotating outages to keep the electrical grid from collapsing, leaving millions of Texans without power for days. Residential heating shortages, burst pipes, and water treatment plant failures resulted from the impending crisis.
• Power, water, and gas outages caused by torrential rainfall-induced floods and landslides in parts of Germany, Belgium, Austria, and the Netherlands in July 2021.
• California’s first rolling blackouts in 19 years, caused by extreme heat and high demand.
• As the California situation has shown, the power sector is at a tremendous risk due to wildfires – at being both, susceptible to and be the cause of such wildfires.

Technological solutions to leverage

With climate emergencies amplifying the level of threats as well as impact, players in the utility sector are shifting to more resilient strategies.

The pandemic has turned the spotlight on the necessity of building resilience for utility companies and has driven home the need to embrace digitalization.

Leveraging digital tools in combination with state policies and best practices can help better predict and mitigate the extent of the impact of extreme weather events as well as aid in faster recovery after the event passes. Advanced technologies including AI/ML, IoT, and cloud-first solutions can help simulate and assess the level of preparedness for threats in a controlled, virtual environment. Such simulations aid the identification of vulnerabilities within the infrastructure, which could be remediated appropriately.

Modern technological solutions can be built to effectively achieve real-time monitoring and maintenance measures. With capabilities such as optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR), image and text processing can be digitalized, and data entry of information such as infrastructure asset details can be automated. Satellite imaging is another safe and terrain-independent solution that aids round-the-clock surveillance of utility infrastructure as well as vegetation and weather. Further possibilities of tech-enabled maintenance solutions encompass:

• Using drones, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), vehicle-mounted cameras for quick and enhanced field data collection
• Deploying high-definition pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras for fire ignition hazard monitoring and surveillance of utility assets and premises
• Leveraging machine vision technology (MVT) to expedite processes such as asset inspections and vegetation management
• Using state-of-art digital technologies to manage emergency events

Digitally enabled smart solutions can endow susceptible infrastructure elements with a greater degree of resilience. Some of these solutions are preventive while others focus on consistent maintenance and monitoring. A prospective slew of digitally enhanced preventive measures include:

• Infrastructure hardening - preventive measures such as covered conductors and undergrounding of lines can be accomplished with the aid of automated remote monitoring, digital sensors and meters, and other intelligent devices.
• Enhanced vegetation management - bespoke solutions software, automation, drone-based monitoring in combination with utility staff coordination can efficiently mitigate risk to electrical infrastructure.
• Deploying assorted weather sensors and weather stations - IoT-based weather monitoring systems can monitor the weather conditions at a given place; can be leveraged to forecast, plan and prepare in advance for, or even alleviate imminent weather-induced casualties.
• Setting up dedicated operations centers - AI-driven applications and solutions can enhance operational efficiencies in several key areas such as predictive maintenance, load forecasting/ optimization, grid reliability, energy theft prevention, and renewable resource optimization for wildfire safety, storm response, and other emergencies.
• Leveraging AI/ML technology and real-time inputs - accurate field data on weather and vegetation can be leveraged to streamline risk-based modeling of infrastructure utility assets.
• Enhanced cybersecurity threat monitoring - pre-built assessment frameworks and aligned services to achieve enterprise-level services for vulnerability management and application security driven by automated scanning, remediation tracking, actionable reporting, and triaging of vulnerabilities.