14/11/2011 Ergon Energy to switch on spatial data collection project - spatial data pro…

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Simon Grose (CIO) 14 November, 2011 12:34

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Power utilities are

on the verge of

their greatest

transition ever

When James Bangay started working for Ergon Energy as an electrical

engineer he expected to spend his working life designing power reticulation

systems.

Still with Ergon, he is now in charge of one of the world’s biggest geospatial

data capture exercises which is also one of two development projects

worldwide for Google’s Earth Builder service.

“No engineer likes to admit they’ve made a transition to IT, but this is

certainly engineering technology at its best,” Bangay says.

Ergon distributes electricity across 1.7 million square kilometres —

covering 97 per cent of Queensland and several Torres Strait islands — via

its prime asset and major management challenge: 150,000 kilometres of

transmission lines held up by about a million poles. It has about 1.5 poles

per customer and covers more area per customer than any other power

utility in the world.

As general manager of Ergon’s Remote Observation Automated Modelling

Economic Simulation (ROAMES) Group, Bangay is about to flick the

switch on a spatial data collection project that will capture light detection

and ranging (LIDAR) and photographic reference images of the whole

network each year.

The annual snapshots will inform network

maintenance planning and provide a platform to

develop predictive models.

“The biggest challenge is interpreting the volume

of data we receive to identify where we have

potential issues with vegetation,” Bangay says.

The budget is $4 million a year, which Bangay says will be recouped

directly in savings as the imagery enables Ergon to optimise the timing and

location of work to control vegetation encroaching on its lines.

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Two purpose-designed planes are expected to gain certification from the

Civil Aviation Safety Authority by early November. Before the end of the

year they will begin capturing data over 400 metre-wide strips in the remote

outreaches of Ergon’s network where ‘single wire earth return lines’ serve

isolated homesteads, pump stations, and other facilities. Before the end of

2012 they will have traversed almost 20,000 kilometres per month to cover

the whole network, and be set to go around again.

The enabling technology to ensure the pilots can fly safely at an altitude of

just 500 metres and maintain the aircraft’s orientation to keep the sensors

on target comes from the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial

Information (CRCSI).

CRCSI’s business development manager, George Curran, says the

organisation developed a cruise control autopilot system that takes

account of a range of variables including aircraft dynamics, speed, height,

sensor diffusion, and the LIDAR footprint and intensity.

“It was not previously cost-effective to capture LIDAR data of powerlines

from fixed wing aircraft,” Curran says.

“We also developed a flight path planning system that would plan the

shortest route to cover the whole network.”

The single pilot planes will fly two flights of up to four hours each day,

gathering data at the rate of at least a gigabyte every minute. The raw data

— amounting to between 100 terabytes and a petabyte each year — will be

stored by the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation and made

available to the CRCSI.

“Because powerlines are near all other infrastructure, that infrastructure is

captured as we fly, and our intention is to make that information available

for research by CRCSI so we can better understand other infrastructure,”

Bangay says.

“What is likely to be shared is the intellectual property about how we do

this, and that’s what the CRC is all about.”

The LIDAR data will be captured at a density of 40 points per square metre.

The CRCSI is developing feature extraction processes and algorithms to

enable the detection and identification of more complex single features.

Curran says the project will demonstrate the ability to undertake large

scale data capture and provide a platform to autonomously process,

manage, and apply the data to inform other spatial information projects.

“This is great research and very relevant and we are very proud that it’s a

world first and it’s here in Australia.”

As data is processed and refined it will be stored in Google’s Cloud.

“Rather than hosting that in our own GIS [geographic information system]

environment and then worry about streaming it out to our handheld devices

in the field, Google Earth Builder allows us to host it in a secure

environment in the Cloud,” Bangay says.

He sees the first operational year of the ROAMES project as one step in a

major revolution for the energy sector, as better information enables better

management and planning.

“I wouldn’t choose a career other than in energy right now because power

utilities are on the verge of their greatest transition ever.

“We have a big challenge to reduce the cost of energy and the impact of

energy on the environment; they are probably the world’s biggest problems.

“It’s all about how we manage information to help us optimise how and

when we build infrastructure.”

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Tags: spatial data project,

Remote Observation

Automated Modelling Economic

Situation (ROAMES),

management, James Bangay,

Ergon Energy

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