Utilities Centralize Grid Inspection Data for Risk Modeling — SkimNews
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- Hawaii and Texas commissions are updating wildfire mitigation plan guidance so inspection findings feed into risk and ignition models that drive investment decisions, not just compliance filings.
- Coldwater Board of Public Utilities, a Michigan municipal utility, scaled from a two-feeder pilot to roughly 16,000 assets without adding staff by centralizing inspection data into a digital asset condition hub.
- Evergy ran manhole inspections in 2016 Missouri with a three-person qualified electrical crew (one underground, two above for rescue and air monitoring), shifted to non-entry high-resolution imaging in 2019, and moved all imagery into Grid Vision® in early 2026.
- Travis Clark, Evergy's Asset Management Engineer, said centralizing the data gave teams across the business 'a current, reliable picture of our system they'd never had access to before.'
- A Mountain West utility found roughly 7% of observed cotter pins installed upside down, a defect that can raise the odds of conductor movement or arcing under high-wind, high-fire conditions and trigger ignition.
- Adaptive AI approaches let utility teams train a detector for a new defect type and run it across years of existing inspection imagery in about 30 minutes, versus weeks of model development and months of field investigation, per eSmart Systems.
Why it matters: For Evergy, centralizing manhole imagery means design teams verify underground infrastructure from their desks instead of dispatching crews, cutting truck rolls and confined-space entries. The Smart Electric Power Alliance's wildfire technology framework now treats asset condition intelligence as foundational across all risk-reduction stages, and Hawaii and Texas are writing that expectation into WMP guidance.
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