As electric utilities confront unprecedented growth driven by data centers and AI-powered computing, maintaining grid reliability has become more complex than ever. For Dominion Energy Transmission, this rapid expansion has accelerated the need for more advanced, data-driven approaches to asset inspection and management. By combining innovative inspection technologies, visual AI, and GIS, Dominion Energy is modernizing how it monitors and maintains critical infrastructure, building a scalable foundation to support future growth while continuing to deliver safe, reliable, and affordable energy to customers.
Challenge
Dominion Energy faces the growing challenge of meeting rapidly increasing load requirements driven by data centers and AI computing while continuing to deliver reliable and affordable energy. As the world’s largest data center–serving electric utility, Dominion already supports more than 450 connected data centers, and demand from AI-driven computing is projected to increase by 17 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. Managing this growth places significant pressure on the utility’s transmission and distribution infrastructure and requires new, scalable approaches to asset inspection, visibility, and decision-making to ensure grid reliability keeps pace with demand.
Partner
Dominion Energy is an American energy company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, managing 6,800 miles of transmission lines across Virginia and North Carolina supported by approximately 47,000 structures. The utility also operates more than 58,000 miles of distribution lines across the same region. Dominion Energy embraces innovation and the adoption of new technologies to better serve its customers and strengthen long-term grid resilience. To support this strategy, Dominion partnered with Buzz Solutions, a Palo Alto–based software company founded in 2017 that provides visual intelligence to help electric utilities improve inspections, asset management, and reliability. Buzz Solutions’ platform is used by utility teams across transmission, distribution, substations, and solar infrastructure to extract faster and more consistent insights from visual data.
Solution
To maintain reliability of their rapidly growing grid, the utility initiated a centralized strategy to modernize their asset inspection program. This enterprise-wide program leverages new remote-sensing data and analytics technologies designed to modernize inspections across transmission, distribution, substations and solar leveraging.
The program incorporates the following:
- An industry-leading drone program for image capture, including more revealing images from above assets and closer range as well as image tagging with timestamps and GIS location data
- A scalable central repository of remotely sensed images to improve data quality and visibility of assets across utility teams.
- GIS acting as the central hub in the inspection ecosystem ensuring that images are properly mapped to structures. ArcGIS enables a multi-layered, geospatial view of the grid and provides broader visibility of results to utility stakeholders.
- Analytics for image and thermal data to improve and speed up decision making. Dominion is using Buzz Solutions PowerAI visual intelligence platform which has standard integrations with ArcGIS to ensure accurate mapping of images to structure and visibility of inspection results to utility GIS users.
- Using inspection results and prioritization to drive actions. High-priority defects can flow into work order systems to drive quick repairs and results can be integrated with asset management systems to help utilities optimize asset replacement programs.
Results
Dominion Energy has already realized strong early results from the program. The utility is achieving more than 85 percent detection accuracy for key asset attributes such as insulator types, foundation conditions, paint degradation, and bird guards. Insight delivery has accelerated significantly, with 74,000 images analyzed in just three and a half hours, and inspection analysis time reduced by approximately 70 percent through the integration of GIS, imagery, and SAP asset records. Faster turnaround of inspection data from the field directly informed the addition of 38 new towers to Dominion’s 2025 paint program and enabled more frequent overhead circuit inspections. Based on this early success, Dominion has expanded the program to include substation components, thermal and gauge readings using docked drones, and an ArcGIS-based view of transmission assets supported by Atomic Maps for imagery management.
“By investing now in the development of AI models, we are laying the foundation for more efficient use of resources in the future. This approach will introduce an independent analytical capability, create a centralized repository for records, and support enterprise‑wide visibility into system condition.”
– Matt Rogers, Manager Transmission Lines, Dominion Energy
