ThinkEnergy

Trees are a major cause of power outages. They're also a wildfire risk—when branches hit a conductor, a small spark can become a big blaze. Lynn Petesch of Overstory joins thinkenergy to talk trees, exploring how AI, satellite imagery, and vegetation intelligence help utilities prevent outages and reduce wildfire threats. Including Hydro Ottawa, who saw a 44% drop in tree-related outages since partnering with Overstory. Listen in for how we work together to keep the grid safe in an era of extreme weather.   Related links  Overstory: https://www.overstory.com/ Lynn Petesch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnpetesch/  Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114  Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en    To subscribe using Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinkenergy/id1465129405   To subscribe using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7wFz7rdR8Gq3f2WOafjxpl   To subscribe on Libsyn: http://thinkenergy.libsyn.com/ --- Subscribe so you don't miss a video: https://www.youtube.com/user/hydroottawalimited Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydroottawa Stay in the know on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HydroOttawa Keep up with the posts on X: https://twitter.com/thinkenergypod ----- Transcript: Welcome to thinkenergy, a podcast that dives into the fast, changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com, Hi everyone. Welcome back. Today on thinkenergy, we're going to be talking about trees. Yes, you heard that correctly. Trees. I know this is a show about energy, but there's actually a very real connection between our electricity grid and those slow growing, majestic givers of shade, lumber, fruit and so many more benefits. Honestly, who doesn't love trees? But I'm not just kicking this episode off in my capacity as a tree hugger. Let's take a look at this through a utility lens, and I will use Hydro Ottawa as an example. Hydro Ottawa service territory includes some very rural and very forested areas. Even our urban territory has a fairly extensive tree canopy. As a result, Hydro Ottawa trims about 60,000 trees each year. Why? Because trees contracting power infrastructure is a big problem. Tree interference remains a leading cause of power outages for us. Strong winds force them onto our wires. Heavy snow or freezing rain builds up and weighs down branches, breaks limbs, and increases the risk that part of a tree may touch a line, and in some extreme cases, heavy storms can even send trees or branches crashing into our poles, damaging the poles. The struggle between power lines and trees, which, again, don't get me wrong, we all love trees, has been going on for years. There is a constant struggle between trimming enough and getting the right trees trimmed and maintaining as much tree coverage as we can. In 2022 we identified a disruptor in this dance, the solution came through a partnership with Overstory, a company that uses satellite imagery, infrared technology and artificial intelligence to help utilities manage vegetation and trim trees more efficiently. And the timing could not have been better. Just days after we started working with Overstory in the spring of 2022 the derecho hit Ottawa. Our Ottawa based listeners will remember this storm well. It was monumental in the history of our city, and indeed for us as utility, winds reached 190 kilometers an hour. For our non-metric listeners, that's nearly 120 miles per hour. The storm ripped through poles houses and cause considerable damage to our city's urban forests. Overstory played a crucial role during the cleanup and in helping us level up our vegetation management strategies moving forward, we realized that the insights we got from Overstory would help improve our proactive approach to tree encroachment and hazard identification, and this is essential in this era of extreme weather events. We know that climate change is causing more frequent and more extreme weather events. According to Climate Central, the number of weather related power outages in the United States increased by 78% between 2011 and 2021 and severe weather accounted for over 1000 outages across Nova Scotia just in the year of 2024 we want to keep you connected during these heavy storms, and that's why we're looking to organizations like Overstory. So what does Overstory do to help us keep the lights on? Well, without giving away too much, because we're going to get into the details shortly, Overstory through a detailed analysis of the scans they do of our entire grid, identifies high risk areas, which we can then prioritize and better focus our resources when it comes to vegetation management, this level of monitoring and focus reduces the risk of trees from coming into contact with our poles and disrupting Your connection to the grid, the results speak for themselves. Since partnering with Overstory, we've reduced vegetation related outages by 44% and that's only part of the story, as we'll discuss further, Overstory also plays a crucial role in helping utilities prevent wildfires in high risk areas across North America, similar to extreme weather, wildfire frequency and intensity is also increasing, in part due to climate change expanding cities and many other factors. And when wildfires do happen, these stories are heartbreaking. What many people don't realize is that lots of wildfires are sparked by trees making contact with power lines, and that is why Overstory plays a key role in tagging areas where those fires are most likely to ignite and spread, making it easier for utilities to prioritize trimming work and vegetation management in those areas. To dive more into how Overstory is helping us here at Hydro Ottawa and. And other utilities helping us identify and act to mitigate risk associated with vegetation. I'm really excited to have Lynn Petesch on the show today. Lynn is Overstory's, Head of Customer Success, and has spent the past 10 years building customer facing teams with a specific focus on technologies that tackle the climate crisis. She began her career working for the United Nations and the diplomatic service of her home country, Luxembourg, before moving into the tech sector to really work in environments where she could drive impact more quickly and at greater scale. Lynn Petesch, welcome to the show.   Lynn Petesch  05:34 Thank you. Thanks for having me.   Trevor Freeman  05:36 Okay, so let's start at the very top with a high level look at what Overstory does and how the organization came to be.   Lynn Petesch  05:45 Yeah, let me tell you about Overstory. I mean, we are a vegetation intelligence platform. We use remote sensing and AI to give electric utilities, including Hydro Ottawa and others, a clear, system wide view of their risk. They always do it because they want to address three things, or sometimes more, but kind of, there's always a few goal posts, and it's either improving reliability, reducing wildfire risk, if that is if they're in an area where there is a concern, and or improving operational efficiencies. So Overstory very much becomes a decision-making tool for their programs were used mostly by the vegetation management people, operations people, wildfire mitigation teams, and they each time they want to either use a program that exists, prioritize it, reshape their work. They might be preparing for storm. They might be working on a wildfire mitigation risk so the company, more broadly, was founded in 2018 by Anniek Schouten and Indra den Bakker. This was back in the Netherlands, and they were leveraging, or getting really interested in satellite imagery, and were very initially using it for deforestation purposes. So, the climate resilience DNA has always been with us. But like any startup, we were looking at that kind of target audience that was most interested in what we had to offer. And pretty quickly, we landed on the electric utilities. They had the most pressing need to use remote sensing at scale to solve very big problems, honestly. And so we pivoted into that space of electric utilities, and then in 2020 Fiona Spruill, who's our CEO right now, she joined us. She shaped the company into what it is today, and that is really around building safer and more reliable operations.   Trevor Freeman  07:33 That's great, and I want to dive into some of the details. Our listeners will know that we talk a lot about grid modernization here and talk a lot about better intelligence of what's happening on the grid in all aspects, and something we haven't really talked about, and I'm excited to talk to you about today is the sort of vegetation management side of it. So really excited to get into the details. But before we do that, I'm always really curious to understand, you know, the people behind the conversations. How did you get into this area of, you know, high tech vegetation management? I touched a little bit on your bio in the intro, but give us a sense of, you know, how did Lynn come to be in the space that you're in right now?   Lynn Petesch  08:12 Yeah, I wouldn't say I grew up thinking I was going to work in this space, but I love working in it now. So actually, right out of college, I went to work for the United Nations, but then in the last 15 years, I started working at high growth tech companies, startups, and I've always been focused on leading and building CS operations, which is basically the customer success teams. They're the ones that are in front of the customers, implementing these software programs, kind of working very