The electric energy industry is facing monumental challenges on multiple fronts; part of the solution may come from new capabilities realized by deploying rugged mobile computing advancements with other emerging technologies in Transmission and Distribution (T&D) field services. This article examines advances in rugged mobile computing, especially in Artificial Intelligence (AI) – ready mobile devices, implemented in electric energy T&D fieldwork and the resulting benefits to the electric energy industry.

The influence of higher technologies in rugged computing

Digitization, grid modernization and incorporating renewable and regenerative power sources, decarbonization, grid security threats from a multitude of ever-changing and invisible sources, evolving destruction from climate change and energy demand that is expected to double, or even triple, by 2050 count among the daunting list of trials faced by electric utility companies.

Simultaneously, however, many technologies are rapidly developing and emerging that may be used to help address these trials, and no technology has a brighter spotlight on it right now than AI. AI churns Big Data into meaningful and actionable information. It powers the Internet of Things (IoT) and animates digital twins.

Just as IoT signaled the coming intelligent edge, the fifth generation of mobile network technology (5G) laid the way for AI applications in communications. Mobile rugged computer manufacturers with their eyes on these impending developments prepared their devices with more powerful processors, more robust connectivity and longer battery life to support advancements in the field, making field personnel more efficient and more powerful in their abilities. AI and its offshoot Generative AI, aboard AI-ready rugged mobile laptops delivering up to 100 TOPS (Trillions or Tera Operations per Second), and in combination with other emerging technologies including drones, AR/VR and the next generations of cellular networks will help the electric energy industry take command of its continuing challenges.

An increasing need for rugged 5G smartphones, tablets and laptops was to be expected. However, the deployment of 5G technology and AI aboard rugged devices is a game-changer for the rugged mobile computing market and the industries that use them. It brings about a whole new level of connectivity and data transfer capabilities that are essential with current cloud-based data and will only become more prominent as intelligence is moved to the edge. Integration of 5G and IoT technologies into these devices makes them increasingly crucial tools in the field where they help people make faster, better, data-driven decisions that can increase efficiency, revenue and profits.

What can’t a drone do?

These small-ish unmanned flying machines are proving to be the darlings of many industries and are a boon in the T&D world, as well. A drone can help a utility set up its field IoT network by installing sensors and then, it can monitor grid hardware for faults or damage. For an electric utility, being able to see its grid is essential and it needs views of multiple angles from up high and up close. So, getting high-resolution pictures, video and imagery of all kinds is an integral part of T&D work.

Drones may be equipped with a variety of cameras to take pictures and videos of the grid for normal monitoring and security purposes, or to provide updates to a digital twin model of the grid. Sending a drone to the top of a transmission tower keeps field personnel safer, and it’s faster and easier to get images from a variety of angles. A mobile rugged tablet or laptop may be used to program the drone’s flight path or control it directly from the device’s keypad, cutting down on the number of devices a professional in the field must carry.

AI comes into play in both the drone itself and in the laborious task of scanning images taken by them. It is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario, where AI can be used to scan the images that the drone captures, and then, those images can be used to inform the algorithm of an AI-powered drone about what a vulnerable segment of a tower or cable looks like.

EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, has undertaken a project to help forward AI modeling. It’s likely some data review tasks can be automated by leveraging machine vision, machine learning (ML) techniques and AI. Still, the model developers formulated needed training data to create these systems. The Institute saw that today, there is very little overhead inspection imagery publicly available to support academic, private industry and utility research on the area. EPRI is addressing that industry gap by collecting, cleaning, labeling and sharing utility inspection imagery. To date, they have collected over 150,000 images of utility infrastructure mostly from an aerial perspective.

Utilities may use all the varieties of gathered data from IoT points, imagery and other functional information as the basis for a digital twin of the business and its T&D grid. They then may use AI to analyze the data. This living model enables the utility to simulate different scenarios and solutions and conduct everything from planning and allocation of resources to grid management and weather and outage prediction, which will be a major contributor to addressing virtually their entire list of challenges. However, the digital twin model must continually be fed new data from the physical world – IoT devices and field computing – to stay relevant. Additionally, the model will be accessed from the field to help with real-time decision-making.

But the weather...

Climate change impacts on T&D include damage from more powerful, more frequent storms and new climate-related events including previously unknown phenomena like atmospheric rivers, rising heat indices and resulting heat emergencies, prolonged droughts and more widespread, wildfires. NOAA reports that, as of August 8, 2024, in the U.S. there have been 19 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each. These include 15 severe storm events, one tropical cyclone, one wildfire event and two winter storm events. The aftermath of these weather and climate events brings more technicians out into the field to survey and repair damage. One of the field tech’s allies is the sophisticated but rugged computer that will persevere through more than the USPS - rain, sleet, snow, heat, hail and being dropped from height – to help the tech keep their appointed rounds.

Proactively, utilities will want to gather as much storm and climate event data from recent past weather and climate disasters to help them forecast impending harsh weather to improve preparedness.

Where is humanity?

With the dizzying array of powerful technologies capable of performing increasingly sophisticated and complex tasks, it is tempting to wonder where is humanity in all of this. The need for human touch and human intelligence will not only still be required but will increase. Pervasive digitization brings increased cybersecurity risks, which signals an increased need for security measures that include in-person infrastructure monitoring. And, as utilities continue to build out smarter, more distributed grids and microgrids, more field technicians will be needed to support T&D. In fact, there is more likely to be a shortage of T&D field personnel than the risk that technologies would replace them. The application of evolving technologies and mobile rugged computers that support them gives the field technician a new opportunity to do less repetitive or potentially dangerous work and instead creatively apply these tools and technologies to field T&D tasks.

An example: By enabling AI application predictive maintenance, AI can assist T&D field technicians and engineers by saving time and costs on process documentation and repair. Field-based professionals may implement ML to teach rugged mobile computers how to perform tasks and make predictions based on data and patterns that emerge from the data. The computer can then forecast a system fault and take proactive measures to avoid failure. On a more mundane level, a field engineer may institute a program where vegetation and tree growth may also be anticipated and interference with T&D sites prevented.

Deloitte, in its 2024 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook*, paints a picture of saving time and boosting efficiency in the field with a generative AI-enabled voice assistant that can provide guidance and investigate maintenance history while leaving the employee’s hands free to perform tasks and resolve technical issues. These applications can lead to speedier maintenance, improved performance and less downtime.

Valuable human resources assign tedious, repetitive tasks to newly available technology tools while using their skills, knowledge and creativity to conceive of new systems and applications. So, human expertise does not get replaced by AI; it is further informed by it.

Consider this segment from an article written for the 2024 IEEE PES T&D Conference, “Given the complexity of the multifaceted energy industry and the niche knowledge necessary for certain tasks, leveraging AI and ML isn’t as straightforward as it is in several other fields. From the T&D perspective, AI is much, much more complicated. It’s not as simple as ‘build and train an algorithm, get a result, make a decision. You have to combine subject matter expertise with data science. It’s an art,” said Abder Elandaloussi, T&D innovation manager at Southern California Edison (SCE). An art performed by knowledgeable humans.

Conclusion

High technology has never been so close to so many everyday people at home and work across industries. You might even say it has never been so down to earth. The intelligence might be artificial. We may send more and more power and compute capabilities to that rugged computer at the edge and devices used in the field may become quite sophisticated, but they must still be built for a rugged world. Even as they crunch an algorithm for grid management, they may be out in torrential rain, glaring sun, or in the hands of a field engineer trying to juggle one too many things and the computer is the one that drops to the ground. There is a bit of poetry in a rugged device out in the field, supporting the latest technologies to perform complex computing under harsh conditions. Ultimately, each new, exciting technology and each enabling tool will be marshaled to the benefit of the business where it is deployed and to the people who work there, simply supporting humanity.