American Electric PowerClientAmerican Electric Power (AEP) Service FootprintOne of the largest electric utilities in the United States, delivering electric to more than 5 million customers in 11 states over some 39,000 miles of transmission lines. Executive SummaryAEP was seeking a more accurate, consistent, and timely solution for complying with NERC rules, while gaining demonstrative operational benefits that would allow the enterprise to better understand and protect its infrastructure, including some 39,000 miles of transmission lines. AEP selected URMC and its partner, ArborMetrics Solutions, to undertake an extensive proof-of-concept to substantiate the accuracy, speed, and costs of URMC's LIDAR-enabled asset inventory system. The TestURMC was charged with identifying immediate vegetative threats that might have been missed by recently completed AEP helicopter surveillance over 2,500 miles of transmission lines. The project, conducted 60 days ahead of schedule, required three months to complete over the summer of 2007. The FindingsURMC's LIDAR-enabled technology and analytics software identified 256 additional critical events missed by AEP's helicopter team, where vegetation or tree growth represented a serious threat to safety, security, and reliability of transmission lines. To audit these findings, AEP dispatched a field team to conduct a two-day helicopted survey, which confirmed 98 percent of the critical events were, in fact, serious according to NERC criteria. The ConclusionURMC's risk management solution proved remarkably more accurate and faster than traditional labor-intensive methods. The proof-of-concept demonstrated that LiDAR data, imported and analyzed by URMC's proprietary software, provides highly accessible business intelligence that can be used throughout the enterprise to avoid outages, protect public safety, enhance asset management, and safeguard a utility's infrastructure and investment — as well as comply with NERC rules for compliance, and the creation of an auditable field action plan.
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