NV5
Offering Robust Geospatial Solutions for Electric T&D

Electric utilities are pivotal in providing electricity to residences and businesses in the U.S. However, the emerging labor shortage, rising energy consumption, and uncontrollable weather events, coupled with the aging grid, adversely affect electric utilities’ safety, customer service, and reliability. A boots-on-the-ground approach to utility management is no longer viable in coping with the demands surrounding reliability, regulatory compliance, risk mitigation, and asset management.

NV5 Geospatial, one of North America’s most comprehensive geospatial data firms, enables utilities to proactively address problems in their transmission and distribution networks without impacting operations or services. With its innovative remote sensing applications and data analysis tools, NV5 Geospatial has carved a significant position in the transmission and distribution of electric utilities, mapping 120,000 to 150,000 miles of utility networks annually. Its clientele includes over 30 investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and municipal utilities.



NV5 provides data acquisition solutions powered by geospatial technologies like lidar, ortho imaging, hyperspectral analysis, and thermal imagery to boost asset and vegetation management processes. Analyzing the geospatial datasets of electric grids, reduces the risks, increases dependability, and improves the operational efficiencies for electric utilities.

“Our capacity to supply massive utility datasets using the right geospatial technology that mitigates issues through analytics, artificial intelligence and picture recognition give us a competitive edge,” Eric Merten, VP and general manager of commercial markets of NV5.

Unlike geospatial vendors that only deliver enormous raw datasets, NV5 provides powerful analytics and tailored solutions for client issues. Through its SaaS platform, INSITE, NV5 allows clients to input, search, analyze, manage, integrate, and export geographical data and multimedia, enabling the seamless monitoring of project progress. This competency is driven by NV5’s deep expertise, which lets it recognize that offering chunks of data without insight overwhelms consumers instead of equipping them to address challenges.

For vegetation management, NV5 identifies and quantifies the risks connected to utility assets and vegetation and utilizes historical outage data and lidar to determine the relative asset risk from each tree to determine a “risk score” associated with each encroachment. This enables the utility to spend their dollars in a way to reduce the greatest amount of risk as opposed to a cycle-based removal of vegetation.In addition, this data set used for vegetation management can be leveraged for use in other departments including, engineering, joint use, automated meter infrastructure, and distribution management.

In the West, NV5 Geospatial has seen a dramatic increase in the use of its geospatial data and analysis for Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS), which multiple clients are leveraging to monitor high-risk fire locations and address engineering or environmental issues as an input to their PSPS procedure. In addition, NV5 Geospatial’s clients are using their products and services to help assist with undergrounding power design and fire-hardening of their assets which is becoming pivotal across the west coast, where wildfires incur billions in losses. This work is then often passed off to the NV5 Core Engineering group, who are experts in underground power distribution design and other fire-hardening techniques. Four years ago, NV5 assisted a west coast client with a system-wide program for gathering data across their entire service area. For this client, it uploaded all the and made it highly accessible to client staff, enabling them to work with the data countless times and effectively respond to queries without going into the field. This client continues to use this data today as a baseline of their system and collects yearly refreshed of their system to enhance this data set not only for PSPS purposes but for general asset and risk management.



For clients that do not have experience with remote sensing, NV5 has a proven track record of progressing quickly from pilot to project to program. It runs a pilot typically to ensure that the most efficient way for the clients to introduce remote sensing capabilities in their daily operations and recognize the value it brings. Ultimately, it develops into a program that involves the acquisition of a client’s entire system, or a portion of it, on a yearly, bi-yearly, or quarterly basis.

Our capacity to supply massive utility datasets using the right geospatial technology that mitigates issues through analytics, artificial intelligence and picture recognition give us a competitive edge

NV5’s strong suit is its customer focus teams (CFT), which are assigned to the same client year in and year out to build a deep working relationship between the client and team in order to enhance operational and delivery efficiencies. Simultaneously, its consulting team works closely with clients to assess how they utilize data in the field. They also offer suggestions for improvement and assistance for any client-side change management.

NV5 remains a dominant force in the transmission and distribution sector, evolving along with the remote sensing market and tailoring its offerings to the demands of its clients. It intends to release numerous intriguing asset management and identification solutions backed by modern sensors, cameras, AI, and image recognition for the distribution space. On the transmission side, NV5 is improving risk-based analysis to enhance the understanding of transmission system risks and help utilities harden their infrastructure instead of solely observing vegetation or other risk factors. It has also developed RS, a second-generation substation robot that autonomously monitors a substation and provides real-time feedback and information utilizing thermal and lidar images.