CenterPoint employs AI to predict hazards to power lines  – Houston Public Media

Tom Perumean

The embattled utility CenterPoint Energy is responding to demands that they increase their resilience to natural disasters following Hurricane Beryl, where at one point, hundreds of thousands of customers were without electricity for days.

CenterPoint is now deploying an AI-driven platform to pinpoint potential hazards.

Eric Easton, Vice President of Grid Transformation and Investment Strategy, says CenterPoint has 27,000 miles of power lines across the region that take a year and a half to inspect, manually.

Now, with the help of AI, the process takes much less time.

“So now we can analyze our entire overhead distribution system in about three hours, and we can also analyze the transmission system in roughly that same amount of time,” Easton says. “That allows us to look for things like vegetation, changes that we might want to make around wood pole structures, automation devices that we might want to install.”

Easton says the program was developed by the North American division of the Australian software company Neara. The software developer’s main focus is aiding utilities in Australia and Europe to protect their infrastructure to keep the lights on.

Easton says what once took a year-and-a-half to compile, analyze, study and plan is now performed in as little as three hours.

“We can take this model, run different wind tracks, different wind speeds, and can actually produce models that tell us how many resources we might need, where those resources need to be and how do we optimize their activities once they’re on our service territory.”

Easton says the AI software can predict tree growth and know when it’s time to send out crews to remove potential hazards that could fall on lines and blackout communities.

The program will also greatly speed up the time it takes to identify hazards to transmission lines, above and below ground, pinpoint their locations and come up with plans to mitigate them.