A partnership between Auckland and Silicon Valley could potentially make Aucklanders' power bills cheaper, or at least help make power lines stronger and repairs after storms faster.
Linesmen will still go up the poles, but before they need to, inspectors will be able to do a 45-minute check on what is needed five or six times faster because of a new high-tech eyes on the problem - drones.
The drones sport a camera so smart it can ping using a laser to feed maps, listen in with an acoustic tracker for crackling that could presage problems, do thermal imaging and even spot any loose nuts.
"I'm not allowed to play with these toys," Vector's chief engineer Andre Botha said.
"I'd love to do it. But you know these things are quite complex to fly. You get the experts to do that."
The old way - inspectors in their utes, taking photos from the ground of problems 11m in the air - is versus the new way: hovering drones that see from above, then feed all the images back into a machine-learning image analyser GridAware. The system could even tap satellite imagery.
Aerial survey technology from drones captures precision images of electrical assets. Photo: MARIKA KHABAZI / RNZ
"That is how you drive lower-cost energy delivery without compromising reliability," general manager of US-based company Tapestry, Page Crahan, told RNZ from Silicon Valley.
Tapestry was an offshoot of Google/Alphabet's so-called 'moonshot' programme, that five years back began looking at how to use AI to relieve aching pressure on electricity grids.
It chose New Zealand for its self-contained island power grid and generation.
"Vector and New Zealand have been the first place... hopefully showing folks all around the world what artificial intelligence and great technology can do to drive more reliability," Crahan said.
A short case study the partners released on Thursday suggested it worked. It found Vector had doubled its "visibility" of network problems across 150,000 poles from Warkworth to Papakura.
In the field, it was even more dramatic. On Kawau Island, inspections that once took 320 hours of "strenuous onsite" work for a team of eight now took about 12 hours, Tapestry said.
"In the 35 years that I've been in this industry, this is the biggest advancement in how we will manage our overhead assets," Botha said.
Vector will use drones to check on what work is needed before repair crews climb power poles. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Quality from above
Crahan believed it would make a difference to escalating household power bills.
Everyone around the world had this "trifecta" of questions, about price, reliability and increasing electricity supplies, she added.
"On the price of power, the way we think about this... is, how can we deliver insights that help the decisionmakers who, you know, are driving their trucks every day, invest[ing] in new equipment, be as efficient as they possibly can?"
Of course, she hoped this could change how grids work worldwide; Botha, for his part, said it should at least change how the whole of New Zealand does things.
"The quality of the images, the clarity with what we can see, it will help us to forecast the condition and to predict the condition and the future asset health of that asset so much better.
"That benefit will flow to customers not only in terms of that we are more efficient as a business, but also that [it] helps with resilience."
Vector will use drones to check on what work is needed before repair crews climb power poles. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
It would have made a "huge difference" had Vector had this in the wake of the Auckland anniversary storms and Cyclone Gabrielle two years ago.
"It's much faster to send our drones to assess the damage than it is to send out vehicles to drive from pole to pole."
The electric AI would bring change to jobs, Botha said. Inspectors once out in utes would more often be in the back-office evaluating the pictures, or redeployed to other tasks.
Assets on the ground were a different story.
"People are still driving around to look at our transformers, our pillars and our switchgear next to the road," Botha said.
And they would still need expert linespeople to straighten up the poles and fix the wires.
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