GMV successfully concluded SMARTGRIDS-DEMO, a co-funded activity supported by ESA Space Solutions through the ESA ARTES Business Applications Space Solutions Program.

SMARTGRIDS-DEMO aimed to determine how space-based assets could be used to benefit stakeholders in the energy network sector. By making the best of Earth Observation satellite data, the project developed services that can efficiently monitor transmission lines and mitigate problems arising from the management, maintenance, and operation of the energy grid infrastructure.

Thanks to the cooperation of the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity and several European Transmission System Operators (TSOs), GMV was able to consolidate the sector’s needs and develop three services.

The Vegetation Management service helps TSOs to prevent vegetation encroachment in the Right of Way (ROW), i.e., the land corridor immediately below and adjacent to the transmission lines. During the project, GMV’s team developed a cutting-edge deep learning model that predicts the height of vegetation from monocular optical satellite imagery. The model is the core of a pipeline that delivers three products: the “Vegetation Pruning Recommendation for ROW” shows the distance between the top of the vegetation and the conductors by classifying it into different categories; the “Vegetation Pruning Recommendation for border zone areas” identifies the vegetation exceeding a height threshold set by the TSO (see figure), the “Average Vegetation Height for border zone areas” provides the average vegetation height on a span level.

The main product of the Change Detection service is the “Change Detection map”, which identifies and classifies unnatural changes that occurred between T0 and T1 within the ROW.

The Disaster Management service provides an urgent analysis to identify and assess damage at a given location in response to a user request triggered by a disaster event.