Contact us
climate-resilient utility infrastructure

Is Your Utility Infrastructure Climate Resilient?

  • Industry news

Climate-related risks are increasing

More frequent and more severe weather events are happening all around the globe. Violent hurricanes in the Philippines, the Caribbean and Eastern Canada, catastrophic floods in Pakistan, and record heatwaves in Europe – all these have hit us in just the last few months. 

These and other extremes have a tremendous humanitarian and economic impact on local communities and damage our critical infrastructure. They affect the safety of pipelines, disrupt transportation and distribution systems, cause power outages, and impact clean water delivery and waste water handling.

The situation is aggravated by two additional factors. 

The first is that a large portion of our current utility infrastructure was designed and built years ago, for climate conditions that were more favourable and less volatile. The second is that regulation and the demands of our journey to net zero mean increasing requirements on our utility networks with regards to their flexibility, reliability and performance. These two factors combined mean that our utility networks are increasingly vulnerable to climate-related issues.

Also, we shouldn’t forget that the utility sector is a highly interconnected system, where energy generation requires water, water supply requires energy. Thus, damage to one utility network can easily cascade into disruption across all utility networks.

Impact of climate and weather events on different types of infrastructure

Power network operators are particularly exposed to the risk of flooding, icing and tree fall during storms, all of which cause widespread outages. On the other hand, rising temperatures and periods of drought drastically increase the risk of wildfires and short circuits due to sagging. 

As for gas and water network operators, the roots of encroaching vegetation, periods of drought, flooding, natural land movement and landslides can put undue pressure on underground pipelines and ultimately cause leakages and supply disruption. 

In order to mitigate these risks, utility network operators need to not only increase their monitoring of risks, changes and encroachments in and around their assets but also to increase their understanding of the environmental conditions that their assets have experienced over the years, and how those conditions are changing with climate change.

Local insights as a part of a risk mitigation strategy

Of course, climate change affects each corner of the world differently, and when we say corner of the world we don’t mean nationwide, we don’t mean regionally, we really mean locally down to a scale of kilometres.

In order to design effective risk mitigation strategies, it’s essential for utility operators to understand the environmental conditions their assets are exposed to, and how these have changed over time. 

Have a look at the analysis below which shows how instances of severe weather (heavy rain, high winds and freezing temperature) have significantly increased over the last 10 years (orange and red) in some locations, but decreased (green and blue) in others.

Note: This analysis is part of the Spottitt MF Climate Conditions Monitoring. One of a number of infrastructure monitoring solutions delivered by the Spottitt MF platform, a metric-rich cloud-based solution that allows infrastructure owners to monitor a wide range of asset risks, at scale using satellite imagery and other GIS data. More info here.

How to protect infrastructure from weather extremes

In order to put in place sufficient mitigation and adaptation plans, infrastructure owners and operators need to be fully aware of the local environmental and other risks, and as we have shown above, even the climate is dynamic.

Satellite-based monitoring allows for the remote inspection of thousands of kilometres of infrastructure assets, regardless of their geographic location. Frequent revisits, fast data and analytics delivered in a digital format make these services cost-effective and easy to plug into existing GIS, SAP and asset management systems.  

This helps maintenance managers define well-informed and geographically tailored action plans for minimising their exposure and recovery from the identified risks. Based on the data, they may decide to invest in new assets, asset upgrades, redundancy, or improve the speed of network recovery post-event.

Conclusion

Unless utilities become more prepared for climate change and the increasing frequency and ferocity of extreme weather events, they expose themselves and society to both physical and financial risks. Forward-looking critical asset owners and operators must have local insights into the environmental conditions their assets are exposed to, and how these have changed over time in order to implement maintenance strategies which improve grid resilience and reliability. Asset owners need cost-effective digital monitoring solutions that provide regular local insights and metrics at a national scale, and Spottitt is showing that satellites have a key role to play in this.

Lucy Kennedy

Lucy Kennedy

Spottitt CEO and FIRE EO Evangelist for Infrastructure

Linkedin

Our latest news:

Spottitt Closes Investment

Spottitt Closes 800K USD Bridge Financing Round

June 17, 2024

In only 12 months since its launch, our AI-powered geospatial analytics service, Spottitt Metrics Factory, has gained significant traction and annual recurring revenue (ARR) among critical infrastructure owners.

Today, we are thrilled to announce the successful closure of an $800,000 bridge financing round.

This round has been led by US based VC fund, Right Side Capital Management, with support from our existing shareholders, KIC InnoEnergy SE, three amazing angel investors, and Spottitt founders CEO Lucy Kennedy and CFO Paolo Senes. We could not have achieved this funding milestone so swiftly and smoothly without the Qubit Capital team.

Spottitt Provides a Solution to Automatically Detect Changing Conditions on the NSW Road & Rail Network

March 28, 2024

Spottitt became Finalist in Transgrid’s Challenge for real-time insights for company’s easement route planning and Champion for Transport for NSW Challenge for tracking safety of roads and railways using satellite data.

The New South Wales network includes 6,800 route kilometres of operational rail lines and 17,600 km of state roads and highways.

TfNSW has identified Earth Observation satellites as a valuable addition to the monitoring technologies currently deployed and was looking for innovation to automatically detect changing conditions of network and potential risk modelling.

Satellites Drones Geospatial Data Collection Comparative Analysis

Deciding Between Satellites and Drones for Geospatial Data Collection: A Comparative Analysis

January 31, 2024

In recent times, the landscape of asset monitoring has witnessed a transformative shift with the emergence of advanced technologies, particularly satellite and drone systems.

The utilization of Earth observation satellites for monitoring purposes began gaining momentum in the late 20th century. Free government programs, such as those initiated by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), played a pivotal role in providing open access to satellite imagery. These programs not only facilitated scientific research but also allowed industries to leverage satellite data for monitoring critical infrastructure and environmental changes.

spottitt transgrid transport deloitte

Spottitt to Collaborate with Transgrid and Transport for NSW

December 12, 2023

Spottitt has been selected by Transport for NSW and Transgrid to apply satellite-based and AI-powered technology to automatically detect changing conditions in the NSW road and rail network and to provide real-time insights for Transgrid’s easement route maintenance and planning, respectively.

These projects will be conducted within the GRAVITY Challenge 06 program led by Deloitte Australia, an initiative that brings together start-ups, scale-ups, entrepreneurs and universities to address real industrial and environmental problems using space data. The Collaborate Phase will continue until mid-March 2024.

climate change EU UK Ireland satellite data

Weathering the Storm: Climate Change Threats to Power Grid Infrastructure

December 7, 2023

As our global climate continues to undergo profound transformations, the challenges posed by climate change are increasingly felt across various sectors of society, including critical infrastructure.

Climate change, characterized by rising temperatures, increased occurrences of extreme weather events, and shifting precipitation patterns, have exposed vulnerabilities within power networks. Often designed under the assumptions of historical climate patterns, now they are increasingly susceptible to the new normal of extreme weather, prolonged heat waves, and more severe freezing.

InSAR analysis Infrastructure Monitoring Sentinel Imagery

InSAR Analysis and Corner Reflector Experiments for Infrastructure Stability Monitoring Using Sentinel-1 Imagery

November 16, 2023

National Grid Energy Transmissions (NGET), which owns and maintains the high-voltage electricity transmission network in England and Wales, conducts invasive analysis annually to monitor the towers most at risk of movement. Moreover, the NGET inspection teams perform annual line walking activities and monthly substation inspections during which they visually assess the presence of asset motion. These interventions are crucial to avoid issues which may cause expensive assets replacements or reconstruction. It costs NGET over £6 million per year to monitor only 1% of their most at risk assets.

• Unlocking the Power of Satellite Data
• Satellite Data Sources and Providers
• ML and AI for Geospatial Analysis
• Getting Started
• and more
Get Your Free Copy