Mitigating wildfire risk is a paramount issue for utilities, and they are making significant investments in hardening electrical transmission and distribution infrastructure to mitigate the risk of wildfires. In addition to the upgrade and management of investor-owned assets, vegetation management is essential to keeping trees, branches, and bushes at a safe distance from electrical infrastructure.
NV5’s high-density lidar data acquisition and data analytics capabilities provides modeling of electric infrastructure and surrounding vegetation to identify vegetation that poses significant risk, delivers predictive analytics (trim optimization), and forest analytics for better understanding fuel loading.
The resulting data mitigates wildfire risk, contributes to improved utility reliability, and allows utilities to more accurately plan future vegetation trimming, asset management, and asset capex costs.