Dominion Energy is an American energy company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, serving customers across Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The utility manages 6,800 miles of transmission lines supported by 47,000 structures, along with 58,510 miles of distribution lines. As demand on the electric grid continues to grow, Dominion Energy is modernizing how it inspects and manages its infrastructure. To maintain reliability and safety across a rapidly expanding system, Dominion is leveraging imagery, remote sensing, and analytics to gain deeper visibility into its assets and improve decision-making across its distribution network.
The Challenge
Dominion Energy faces a major challenge in maintaining the reliability of its distribution system while serving increased electrical load driven by data centers and electrification. At the same time, the utility must manage heightened reliability risks from severe storms, particularly along the Atlantic coast. As Dominion scales its drone-based image capture programs, the volume of imagery continues to grow rapidly. Manual analysis of this increasing amount of image and thermal data is no longer feasible, limiting the utility’s ability to act quickly and proactively to prevent failures and maintain system reliability.
The Partner
Buzz Solutions is a software company headquartered in Palo Alto, CA that provides visual intelligence to help electric utilities make breakthrough improvements in inspections, asset management, and reliability. Buzz was founded in 2017 by Kaitlyn Albertoli, CEO, and Vik Chaudhry, CTO, from work in a Stanford University Launchpad course. Buzz software is used by numerous utility teams for inspections of transmission, distribution, substation, and solar infrastructure.
The Solution
To maintain reliability of their rapidly growing grid the utility initiated an innovative strategy to modernize their distribution asset inspection program. Dominion’s iMAP (Image Management and Analytics Program) is an enterprise-wide program leveraging new remote-sensing data and analytics technologies designed to modernize inspections. iMAP incorporates the following:
- An industry-leading drone program for image capture, including more revealing images from above assets
- A scalable central repository of remotely sensed images to improve data quality and visibility of assets
- GIS acting as the central hub in the iMAP ecosystem ensuring that images are properly mapped to structures and providing broader visibility of results
- Visual intelligence analytics for image and thermal data to improve and speed up decision making. Dominion is using Buzz Solutions PowerAI visual intelligence platform.
- Atomic Maps for image data indexing and management
- Using inspection results and prioritization to drive actions
The Results
Dominion Energy has seen very exciting results from initial stages of iMAP rollout including:
- More accurate pole top inspection resulting in improved reliability
- Faster inspection data turnaround from the field
- Ability to implement more frequent overhead circuit inspections
- Improved KPI’s for reliability and safety
The following results are specific to PowerAI for distribution:
- RGB detections including pole damage, crossarm damage, missing braces, damaged insulators, rusty transformers
- Thermal detections for arresters, cutouts, insulators, splices, and transformers
- PowerAI analyzed 37,406 thermal images across 2,911 poles and found every thermal anomaly that Dominion had identified with manual analysis validating the visual intelligence AI iMAP approach
- PowerAI analyzed 41,095 RGB images and correctly identified 120 damaged cross arms warranting a closer look or replacement
- Image analysis was completed in hours compared to months with previous methods
- Dominion Energy was able to more effectively prioritize work to maximize SAIDI and SAIFI
With iMAP and PowerAI Dominion Energy can identify and address more issues before failures occur to improve reliability of their distribution system. By combining new aerial and workflow softwares Dominion dramatically modernized their inspection processes to gain accuracy, speed, efficiency and to focus resources on the highest priority issues.
“We are proving that we can rapidly scale our distribution aerial inspections using drone technology and use PowerAI to accelerate the analysis of the increasing volume of imagery. With PowerAI we can find more issues sooner and preempt more failures to boost system reliability.”
– Will Farmer, Dominion Energy
