When a tree branch falls across a power line in a remote forest, nothing happens at first. Most often, the branch will end up falling harmlessly to the ground, and the utility that controls that span of the electrical grid—and the residents of the surrounding communities—will never know about it.
But sometimes, the branch stays stuck. The local area experiences a drought, and the branch becomes kindling. A high-heat day comes along, and maybe some gusts of wind. Then, all it takes is a spark for that tree branch no one noticed to start an inferno.
Naturally, we all focus on the wildfire—the communities devastated, the lives lost, the horror of a smoke-filled sky. But if we want to address the problem, we need to pay attention to small hazards like tree branches, overloaded lines, rotting poles, and damaged insulators. More than that, we need to pay attention to all the days those hazards go unnoticed.
At Gridware, we call this gap Hazard Awareness Delay.
If we can eliminate Hazard Awareness Delay we can not only dramatically reduce incidents of grid-related fires, but also prevent outages, improve worker safety, and extend the life of critical infrastructure.
I’ve seen the impacts of Hazard Awareness Delay first-hand. When I was a lineman in Victoria, Australia, I was called upon to help restore power infrastructure after the Black Saturday bushfires that killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes. The fires that caused most of these deaths were started by faulty grid equipment, including a downed power line and an incorrectly installed four-decade-old conductor. The utility in charge of the grid had no way to monitor its aging infrastructure. As a result, operators could only react after the fires were already well underway. The blazes spread rapidly due to high temperatures and drought, and when they reached the ubiquitous, highly combustible eucalyptus trees in the area, the flames towered more than 300 feet high.
Black Saturday jolted me, and I felt the impulse to shift my career to wildfire prevention and mitigation.
The 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California woke many other people up to the dangers of wildfires, and in the aftermath of the event, a wave of vendors rushed “wildfire solution” products to market. But the truth is, most of these solutions were proverbial hammers in search of a nail. They were the result of businesses seeing a market opportunity and slapping a “wildfire” label onto products that were never really built for wildfire prevention.
When we started Gridware, my co-founders and I were determined to take the opposite approach. We began with the problem of Hazard Awareness Delay, and then we worked backward to think about what information crews needed to know as early as possible—and how we might be able to gather and transmit that data, even in rugged conditions and rural areas with no cellular or satellite connectivity.
Thinking back to my own days on the lines, I remembered how connected the grid felt, and how when I was on a pole, I could physically sense a disturbance two or three spans away. My co-founders weren’t convinced at first, and so I built a full scale grid to prove it. Hall Chen, Chief Technology Officer, stood at a pole with his eyes closed, and then I dropped a branch on the lines. When he opened his eyes, I saw that his disbelief had disappeared.
Today, our Gridscopes measure not only changes in vibration (which can be an early sign of mechanical stress), but also subtle shifts in tilt, temperature, and voltage. They are smaller than a pole step, and they can be put up in under 60 seconds—a footprint and installation process designed with lineworkers in mind. Gridscopes are solar-powered, and they communicate using a combination of device-to-device, cellular, and satellite communications. That means they are always on, always connected, and always measuring and transmitting the data utilities need to prevent problems and rapidly respond to hazards.
The Gridscope is the first technology to power a new category of grid management called Active Grid Response.
Active Grid Response, or AGR, eliminates Hazard Awareness Delay by detecting hazards before they escalate. Gridware may be the first at the table, but we know we won’t be the last. And we don’t want to be. With more than 180 million utility poles in North America alone, the grid is a canvas large enough for the creativity and ingenuity of everyone willing to work to make the system safer and more resilient.
After decades of inefficient, reactive response to disasters and outages, we’ve finally defined the real problem. Now it’s time to solve it.
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