NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 6, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- DISTRIBUTECH
2019 -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new technology to
reduce power outages by helping energy companies predict where
trees and other vegetation may threaten power lines. IBM worked
with Oncor, the largest utility company in Texas and the fifth largest in the U.S., to
develop a solution tailored for the energy and utility industry, to
help improve operations and provide reliable electric service for
millions of customers across the state.
The Weather Company Vegetation Management -
Predict is built on IBM PAIRS Geoscope, a
groundbreaking technology developed by IBM Research. The system
quickly processes massive, complex geospatial and time-based
datasets collected by satellites, drones, aerial flights,
millions of IoT sensors and weather models.
The resulting insights can help companies like Oncor to monitor
vegetation growth across their entire service territory, allowing
them to better identify and predict potential infringement with
power lines. Businesses can more proactively and accurately plan
for preventive maintenance and rapid response, focusing crews in
the highest-priority locations and validating that necessary
trimming was completed as expected.
"Electricity is an essential part of our lives, and millions of
Texans depend on Oncor every day. Vegetation poses a serious risk
to power lines and the surrounding areas, but monitoring it is a
challenging and time-consuming process," said Peter Stoltman, vegetation management program
manager, Oncor. "By working with IBM, we are able to use analytics
and AI to prioritize high-risk areas. This helps us adapt
maintenance operations to improve public safety and service
reliability."
Vegetation is a leading cause of service interruption for
utility companies. With traditional approaches, the primary insight
into potential risks involves expensive on-site inspections or
knowing the last time an area was trimmed. With this new solution,
hundreds of miles of transmission and distribution lines will be
regularly monitored to provide continuous insight about the state
of growth and maintenance. In addition to helping identify and
predict outage threats, geospatial-temporal insights can help with
overall grid reliability and compliance, wildfire prevention, storm
management and assessment.
"Our utilities clients told us that getting detailed insight
into the state of vegetation across their service territory was a
key challenge," said Mahesh
Sudhakaran, chief digital officer of IBM Energy, Environment
and Utilities. "By combining PAIRS with AI and industry expertise,
we can give clients one integrated solution, delivered through IBM
Hybrid Cloud, to help them predict and manage vegetation in a
cost-effective and intelligent way."
"Every business is affected by weather. But for energy companies
and their customers, it can mean the difference between whether
they can keep the lights on and heat their homes," said
Cameron Clayton, IBM's general
manager of Watson Media and Weather. "The ability to layer weather
data with satellite and sensor data gives utility companies
powerful new insights to help them improve operations and minimize
impact on their customers."
PAIRS Geoscope ingests more than 10 terabytes of new data per
day and has already served more than 15 million requests from more
than 4,000 researchers, data scientists and developers in 80
countries. It removes the labor-intensive process of
generating insights from geospatial-temporal data, which is known
for its sheer size and complexity. The inability to access, query
and analyze this class of big data in a scalable way is the reason
it was long considered unsearchable data. IBM scientists
invented a new way to run and analyze complex queries within
minutes instead of weeks or months, making previously impossible
insights now a reality.
PAIRS Geoscope is generally available for different industries
and use cases. In addition to Vegetation Management - Predict,
PAIRS is also the underlying technology for Watson Decision
Platform for Agriculture, a suite of agribusiness tools that uses
the power of AI and geospatial data to help farmers make more
informed decisions about their crops.
Media Contacts:
Melissa
Medori, IBM Watson Media and Weather
mmedori@us.ibm.com
Fiona Doherty, IBM Research
fhdohert@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM