Iberdrola seeks solution to protect powerlines from climate change
Basque startup Woza Labs is partnering with Iberdrola to develop digital solutions to predict and plan for climate risks that can cause damage to network assets.
Woza Labs, the winner of Iberdrola’s start-up challenge for the project, is tasked with designing a programme to determine how climate change and other related meteorological and natural phenomena such as high winds, torrential rains and vegetation growth may affect the company’s grids.
With this Iberdrola intends to prioritise grid investments or reforms to mitigate these risks, scaling the solution across the geographies in which it operates, including Spain as well as the UK, USA and Brazil.
Woza Labs has expertise in areas across the digital domain, including geographic information systems and satellite image analysis.
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In total, Iberdrola has over 1.1 million km of electricity transmission and distribution lines in its networks, which also include over 4,400 high to medium voltage substations and more than 1.5 million medium to low voltage distribution transformers.
A significant cause of failures in distribution networks in forested environments is due to trees and branches falling on conductors.
These falls do not have a single cause, but are generally due to a combination, such as wind, pests, soil erosion, etc., with all of them appearing to be on the increase with the rise of more extreme climatic phenomena.
Thus primary environmental factors that need to be evaluated in developing digital solutions for planning and quantifying the risks of such damage include wind, vegetation density, soil structure and its long-term evolution due to climate change.
Given these threats investments to improve the resilience of the grids are an important focus, with Iberdrola planning to allocate over half of its total €47 billion (US$50 billion) investments in the years 2023-2025 – around €47 billion – in this area.
