Pacific Gas & Electric taps satellite data for tree management

California IOU Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is using satellite data to help spot hazardous trees and reduce wildfire risk as part of its vegetation management activities.

PG&E is partnering with San Francisco Earth imaging company Planet Lab to leverage its satellite-derived data on vegetation including canopy height, cover and proximity to electricity infrastructure to prioritise the mitigation of vegetation-associated risks.

Now in a further year-long contract, PG&E will gain access to weekly ‘basemaps’, i.e. current analysis-ready broad area mosaics, to be used alongside the other vegetation data already being leveraged.

“Planet’s tree data plays an important role as we analyse conditions and changes across our service area,” said Andy Abranches, PG&E’s senior director for Wildfire Preparedness and Operations.

Have you read?
ESB Networks to use digital twin to mitigate weather impacts on the grid
Harnessing the power of the EU’s Space Programme for renewable energy

“We’ve used it to improve our data set of tree density around powerlines, and it has been beneficial as we’ve studied which trees in which locations caused outages during the winter storms last year and this year.”

Going forward, PG&E is adding data showing which trees have the potential to strike powerlines to the next version of its vegetation management risk modelling.

Currently, the company is proving the concept and assessing the potential benefits of machine learning-based tree species identification and dead or dying tree detection models.

PG&E has been using satellite data as a feeder to its wildfire risk models since 2019, with subsequent additions including Planet’s canopy density and tree mortality data – the former indicative of the amount of material that might strike a powerline and the latter of potential dead tree damage and areas of high pest infestation or drought impacts.

With Planet’s ‘Planetary Variable’ vegetation encroachment combining multiple data sources to deliver data on vegetation canopy height and cover, potential strike tree locations and dead tree cover, PG&E can evaluate areas with high potential for vegetation-driven outages and ignitions and in turn optimise the management of these by field workers.

PG&E has estimated that with the satellite and other data, there was a 72% reduction of ignitions in high fire risk areas in 2023 across its 181,000km2 service area compared to the three-year average.