It Began in the Summer of 2007 as an Effort to Comply with NERC Rules regarding vegetation management of transmission. Instead of simply complying with the rules, specifically NERC Standard FAC-003-1, American Electric Power (AEP; Columbus, Ohio, U.S.) is rewriting the book on how utilities can collect and leverage GIS data.

GOALS FOR LiDAR USE

AEP was the first company to deploy a new asset inventory system based on Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology, which was pioneered by ArborMetrics Solutions Inc. (Hendersonville, North Carolina, U.S.) and Utility Risk Management Corp. (URMC; Doylestown, Pennsylvania, U.S.). Beyond allowing AEP to comply with NERC rules and mitigate threats caused by trees and vegetation, the new technology is being tested to determine how it might become an integral component in the 11-state power company's rights-of-way (ROW) clearing, engineering, GIS and overall asset management strategies.

AEP plans to expand the use of LiDAR to conduct comprehensive geospatial inventories of the ROW along its entire transmission network.

AEP hopes to achieve four goals through the use of LiDAR technologies:

1. Maintain its reputation as a significant national transmission provider

2. AEP STRATEGY

   Comply with NERC vegetation management standards

3. Conduct a thorough “proof-of-concept” review of the potential costs and benefits of the LiDAR technology

4. THE PROMISE AND THE CHALLENGE

   Determine all the additional benefits that LiDAR can bring to expansion planning, engineering, operational and maintenance activities for all transmission and distribution lines.

AEP's Lynn Grayson, past president of the Utility Arborist Association, and his field utility foresters' initial reactions to the LiDAR work performed by ArborMetrics and URMC to date have been positive. LiDAR provides better information, faster and with more accuracy than previous methods. Additionally, the information is provided in a format that may be leveraged across transmission and distribution and other areas for a host of risk management and operations tasks.

PINPOINTING VEGETATIVE THREATS

Because of the more stringent NERC vegetation standards, every utility has been forced to increase the level at which it measures and monitors vegetative threats. AEP's vision is much bigger than compliance. It simply wants to be the best, and that means using state-of-the art technology to better understand and protect its infrastructure. By demanding more of itself than the regulators do, AEP's compliance becomes a simple by-product of internal operations. A key part of AEP's strategy is to maintain comprehensive, up-to-date GIS data of all its assets along the transmission ROW.

Initially, AEP considered LiDAR for NERC transmission ROW needs. However, once AEP saw the potential benefits, it challenged ArborMetrics/URMC to demonstrate LiDAR on a mixture of all transmission and distribution voltage lines. AEP has a keen interest in improving customer reliability and reducing customer outages, so it is working to review the potential application of these technologies across its distribution system.

The challenge of using any such system for managing risk is that the utility's network is vast and the environment is constantly changing. Because data accuracy is a moving target, utilities have forever sought asset inventory methodologies that update their data frequently. But, while LiDAR technology has long been known to provide the detailed information companies need, the cost of collecting and processing LiDAR images of a utility's entire footprint has never been economically feasible. The promise of LiDAR has been out there, but there's never been a cost-effective way to turn the data into usable information that utilities can collect on a regular basis.

The initial focus was to apply LiDAR to assist AEP in increasing reliability, mitigating threats and expediting maintenance. However, AEP's forward thinking is transforming what used to be thought of as a high-tech, special-needs application into a practical, system-wide solution. Historically, LiDAR was viewed as either an engineering solution or a vegetation solution. This project is showing how AEP's broader vision may drive value to the electric utility industry.

Like many utilities, AEP has traditionally used an aerial patrol technique (both human visual inspection and video) to prioritize vegetation work. Although these are great processes, AEP's utility foresters know the processes can be subject to human error.

To achieve its first two goals, AEP was first introduced to the ArborMetrics/URMC LiDAR solution last summer, when AEP requested a pilot project on 2500 miles (4023 km) of transmission lines. The objective was to identify any immediate or potential vegetative threats that may have been missed by AEP's helicopter surveillance team, which typically flies along all transmission lines at least annually to visually identify danger trees or aggressive underbrush. Data collection began in the late summer and was completed over a three-month period and more than 60 days ahead of schedule.

After analyzing the data from these collections, the Arbormetics/URMC team reported 247 additional critical events where vegetation or tree growth represented a serious threat to the line — more than AEP's existing methods have found. Each critical event was defined in great detail, including the nature and severity of the problem along with the GIS coordinates of the location. To confirm these findings, AEP sent a team into the field to conduct a two-day helicopter audit to compare the pilot project data to reality on the ground. The audit demonstrated that 98% of the critical events identified by the analysis were serious issues when judged against the new NERC standards. Five of the 247 events were not vegetation related, including a potential safety hazard that was immediately investigated.