How machine learning and satellite imagery help Suur-Savon Sähkö avoid costly damage and prevent service outages

A case study by Overstory and Suur-Savon Sähkö.

Finnish utility Suur-Savon Sähkö and their distribution system operator Järvi-Suomen Energia have partnered with vegetation management intelligence company Overstory for actionable insight into their vegetation risks, at scale. By applying artificial intelligence and satellite imagery to monitor the vegetation around the network Overstory helps Suur-Savon Sähkö to:

  • Build a data-driven risk mitigation plan to avoid costly damage and outages,

  • Improve electricity reliability for their customers,

  • Accomplish more with their available budget.

Challenge

Suur-Savon Sähkö manages an electricity network of about 17,000 miles, distributing electricity throughout Finnish Lakeland, an area covered by forests and lakes. Heavy snows, strong winds, and stormy conditions cause trees to bend, break, and fall down—resulting in outages and millions of dollars in damage per year.

In order to prevent damage and mitigate risk, Suur-Savon Sähkö currently monitors power lines by dispatching helicopters every two years and manually inspecting the images. This method is costly, time-consuming, and prone to human error. In addition, more frequent monitoring is needed to keep track of the continuously changing vegetation due to storms and seasonal changes. Suur-Savon Sähkö needed a cost-efficient way to identify risks more accurately and more frequently. That’s why they decided to partner with Overstory.

“Overstory’s actionable insights, expertise with vegetation, track record with big and small utilities, and overall professionalism made partnering with them an easy choice for us at Suur-Savon Sähkö”

— Arto, Järvi-Suomen Energia

Solution

Suur-Savon Sähkö is partnering with Overstory to obtain a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of their risks and actionable insights for addressing them. Key metrics are optimizing budget while reducing vegetation related outages, more specifically improving vegetation SAIDI and SAIFI. The features in scope include:

  • Vegetation risk score

  • Predicted risk in 24 months

  • Proximity of the tree to the line

  • Height of the tree

  • Tree health

  • Tree species type

  • Single trees standing alone, exposed to windfall

  • Asset information

The platform facilitates sharing and management of actionable vegetation insights on span and tree level with their vegetation pruning partners and arborists.

Tree species intelligence created by Suur-Savon Sähkö and Overstory

Tree species intelligence created by Suur-Savon Sähkö and Overstory

Tree species intelligence created by Suur-Savon Sähkö and Overstory

Tree species intelligence created by Suur-Savon Sähkö and Overstory

Benefits

The collaboration allows Suur-Savon Sähkö to address problems today and also have visibility into likely future needs. Overstory then consolidates this analysis into a comprehensive risk overview. With Overstory’s support, Suur-Savon Sähkö aims for efficiency gains of up to 20%. With the anticipated time and resource gains, Suur-Savon Sähkö plans to address risks that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, further improving service for their customers.

“We have chosen to partner with Overstory not only for their machine learning and vegetation analysis expertise, but also because of the actionable nature of their work. We are not statisticians, so we wanted a partner who could not just do the analysis but could also provide us with clear actionable insights.

With Overstory we have just that. They provide us with a prioritized assessment of risks with our vegetation which we can plug directly into our planning and management of our system. On top of that they are collaborative, communivative, and transparent throughout the process which is also very important to us.“

— Arto, Järvi-Suomen Energia

Learn more about:

  • How Overstory and Suur-Savon Sähkö have combined satellite imagery and machine learning to avoid costly damage and prevent service outages

  • How the operational requirements were achieved and validated, including accuracy, agility and affordability

  • The business results of implementing the vegetation intelligence into Suur-Savon Sähkö operations

Written by:

Indra den Bakker, CEO & Co-founder at Overstory

Arto Pajunen, CEO at Järvi-Suomen Energia