How National Grid Uses TreeRisk™ to Streamline Tough Vegetation Management Tasks 

With better aerial expertise, National Grid streamlines vegetation monitoring, reduces costly field time, and improves outage response.

Background

Vegetation managers are all too familiar with the challenges that overgrown trees can present around electrical transmission lines. A tree that is too close to transmission lines or tall enough to fall onto them can cause an outage and even spark a fire. Monitoring these hazards is especially difficult when field crews are responsible for managing large work areas.

Challenge

Ryan Blothenburg, Western Division Transmission Line Forester for National Grid, encountered these challenges in his work. Blothenburg manages the western third of New York state, which includes roughly 2,800 circuit miles of transmission line over an 8,400-square-mile area. Any time a problem occurred for National Grid in western New York, such as a momentary outage, a field crew would have to patrol hundreds of miles of transmission lines — potentially delaying mitigation. Ground patrols included personnel on foot and riding ATVs as well as helicopters used to survey the corridor. In some cases, Blothenburg said, field crews would wind up in wetlands or other difficult-to-navigate terrain.

National Grid needed a way to view corridors and pinpoint the location of a possible outage before one might occur. They also needed a more efficient way to send crews out into the field when mitigation is required. The faster that crews can reach the origin of an outage and determine the cause, the faster they can restore power for customers.

Solution

To find problem areas remotely over 350 miles of corridor, Blothenburg and his team began using TreeRisk™ from Eagleview. TreeRisk helps vegetation managers pinpoint encroachment risks and confidently take action to mitigate them. With a web-based platform, up-to-date orthogonal and oblique aerial imagery, and complete datasets, TreeRisk enables users to share highly accurate maps to reduce field time and decrease mitigation expenses.

Using TreeRisk’s datasets and three-dimensional point cloud of the corridor, Blothenburg and his team are able to identify potentially hazardous areas and send field crews out systematically to review those locations. TreeRisk highlights where vegetation is growing next to transmission lines as well as where vegetation is too tall beneath the lines.

One key feature of TreeRisk is a detailed mapbook that shows proximity clearance for vegetation. This PDF file can be printed or viewed on a mobile device for use in the field. Vegetation managers like Blothenburg can view the data in the mapbook, see where problems occur, and send field crews right to those locations. Field crews can then take the mapbook with them to refer to on location. It summarizes everything they need to know, such as latitude and longitude coordinates, pole numbers, and street names, and it includes high-resolution aerial imagery of each segment of the corridor.

EagleView Quote

The biggest challenge in vegetation management is that… trees are always growing. It’s not a static environment that we work in, so it’s very important to establish lead times on potential problem areas. That’s where TreeRisk really shines.

Ryan Blothenburg

Western Division Transmission Line Forester

National Grid

Impact

Faster Outage Response

When a transmission line tripped twice in the same 20-span section, Blothenburg used TreeRisk to identify the only potential vegetation risk. Crews arrived within 20 minutes and quickly ruled out vegetation as the cause, saving significant time and cost.

Greater Accuracy

Blothenburg initially hoped for 90% accuracy from TreeRisk, but field testing proved even better results: less than 1% false positives across the entire 350-mile section of corridor that TreeRisk captured. With TreeRisk crews can crosscheck their field measurements and perception with the highly accurate data found in Eagleview’s solution.

Increased Efficiency and Prioritization

Prior to using TreeRisk, Blothenburg’s team would fly the entire line with a helicopter each year. Now they only need to fly where there are problem areas, as shown in TreeRisk. TreeRisk also enables them to be more efficient about when and where they dispatch workers.

Proactive Vegetation Management

Vegetation management professionals need as much data as possible to understand potential problems and remain proactive. With TreeRisk, Blothenburg and team have a tool that could satisfy numerous data needs in the very near future: bidding work, assigning crews by geographic area, or knowing the type of equipment needed in certain areas, for example.

EagleView Quote

We were really, really happy with the product that we got from Eagleview. TreeRisk was just spot-on. In the vast majority of cases, we found very little false-positive data—less than 1% over that entire area.

Ryan Blothenburg

Western Division Transmission Line Forester

National Grid

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