Using Satellite Technology to Predict Power Outages
Can satellite technology actually be used to monitor and predict power outages? According to Maryland-based Earth from Space Institute (EfSi) Director Miguel O. Román, the answer is a resounding yes!
Román has been working on his innovative satellite technology for the last decade while serving as a NASA scientist. His groundbreaking initial Earth-imaging technology, called Black Marble, was a precursor to the utility-focused satellite technology he is working on today. What made Black Marble so special? It achieved a 700% increase in night vision sensor sensitivity.
How Satellite Technology Can Help Electric Utilities
In theory, it makes sense – if utilities can see the big picture, it is reasonable to assume that decision-making would improve. Today, utilities essentially operate in silos. Yes, they cooperate with each other via mutual assistance and other cross-pollinations, but each utility generally focuses only on its own service territory.
This is less than optimal, because any given utility service territory could be impacted by neighboring or adjoining territories. It’s like a domino effect. Therefore, it makes sense that seeing the entire pie, rather than only your slice of the pie, would enable better decisions.
The Earth from Space Institute satellite technology will ultimately help map outage patterns minute-by-minute and street-by-street. As a first step, it creates imagery of what a community looks like at night (i.e., the footprint pattern of lights). This initial “footprint” image serves as the baseline. This baseline image can then be compared to a post-outage image to map every customer outage. This can help with the recovery effort in a number of ways that are too obvious to discuss in detail as part of this post.
The only thing holding back a wide-spread deployment of the technology is the cost – Román estimates that he needs a whopping $250 million to fully commercialize it. Any takers?
