Satellite-based powerline monitoring

GMV has recently signed a contract with EDP Distribuição - Energia, S.A. – Portugal’s biggest energy distribution company – for providing satellite-based powerline-monitoring services. 

Several different factors make it very difficult to implement an effective traditional monitoring service with high repetition capability, low cost, and short execution time. Examples of these complicating factors are the sheer extent of powerline networks, criss-crossing land of difficult access and in different types of landscapes, and the heterogeneity of the neighboring vegetation, with different growth rates. A service based on the exploitation of satellite imagery might well provide a potential solution for this monitoring problem.

The idea of the GMV-developed EOPLINES (Earth Observation for Powerline Monitoring) project is to take advantage of today’s most sophisticated optical satellite capabilities to provide accurate monitoring services for the detection and mapping of the various risks threatening to undermine the operating conditions of powerlines.

The biggest challenge in drawing up a specially-developed risk analysis map is the natural objects that appear in the powerlines’ path, i.e. the natural and spontaneous vegetation, whose growth, fall or partial destruction may cause important damage to the network, with equally important environmental and socio-economic knock-on effects. Examples of impacts that may be caused by the natural vegetation are short-circuits, damage to the powerlines themselves or pylons, fires that destroy the whole powerline infrastructure, etc. There exist yet other risks posed by the powerlines themselves for the surrounding environment, which are just as well determined and reduced by this satellite-based monitoring: electrical discharges because of contact with vegetation, causing fires and even deaths.

This project is based on the study of the type and presence of vegetation in the powerlines’ vicinity. It will support EDP in carrying out Risk Based Management, especially in terms of establishing priority levels for detailed field inspections; better programming of clear cuts in the powerlines’ safety corridors; facilitating clear-cuts cost assessment and definition of requirements.
It will also provide service for the supervision of EDP´s subcontractors.