Iberdrola to test satellite data for vegetation management

i-DE, Iberdrola’s distribution company in Spain, is testing earth observation data provider LiveEO’s Treeline solution for enhanced vegetation management.

i-DE is testing the technology on its distribution network in Vizcaya province near Bilbao in the Basque region of Spain, where Iberdrola is headquartered, throughout 2024.

If the trial’s outcome shows improvement in i-DE’s processes, including supporting its vegetation management strategy, enhancing network reliability and aiding wildfire prevention, the technology could be further rolled across the company’s network areas.

The LiveEO Treeline satellite software solution is designed to improve vegetation risk assessments, including modelling and predicting vegetation growth as well auditing previous work.

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The AI-based package is designed to identify and evaluate all forms of vegetation risks based on satellite data that is processed on a near real-time basis, to enable identification and response to emerging risks as they occur.

LiveEO, regularly named among the top 100 geospatial companies, states its Treeline solution can deliver results including a 15% reduction in vegetation-related outages, a 20% reduction in contractor cost per km and a one-year return on investment.

Other utilities that have deployed the solution include Iberdrola subsidiary Avangrid, Dominion Energy and Liberty Utilities in the US and E.DIS in Germany.

Data from earth observation satellites is becoming an increasingly important element of utility datasets, with vegetation management being a key use case and others including planning and design of new renewables projects, while other space-based data is available for positioning and timing use cases.