Objectives of the service
The ENTEL project is designed to support energy network operators (electricity, gas, solar and wind) in the planning, construction, and operation of their infrastructure. It uses AI processing of Earth Observation (EO) and geospatial data to provide up-to-date information on key features, construction progress, and man-made activities that may impact the infrastructure. The service helps improve operational efficiency, reduce the risk of failures and damages, and achieve compliance with national regulations. It provides updated information on the right of way for maintenance activities, risk reduction, and regulatory compliance.
The service is mainly based on satellite EO data and supports three main lifecycle stages: the identification and selection of optimal route for a new infrastructure during the planning, the analysis of the progress of the construction activities during the construction of a new site/line, and the monitoring and control of interferences by human activities that may damage and compromise the operational functionality of an operating station/line.
Currently, ENTEL focuses on energy infrastructures by a complete set of solutions designed to support the logic of the energy corporates' departments, but it has the potential to be extended to mobility and communication networks in the near future.
Users and their needs
Large infrastructure operators deal with the management of costly assets deployed over very wide geographic areas. Inspections of grids are an expensive and time-consuming activity, needed to be performed for getting useful information about the territory, the status of the infrastructure and of its right of way for planning, controlling the progresses of a new line, maintaining, reducing the risk, and complying with national regulations. ENTEL supports the energy infrastructure operators by monitoring their entire asset during operation, by giving insights on the construction progresses and by providing indication on where to perform more detailed inspections, including the possibility of access to satellite Very High Resolution images of the investigated area.
Based on the existing cooperation, ENTEL has involved Italian TSOs and DSOs as reference users for its implementation. They cooperate in supporting the analysis of customer problems/needs, in providing insight about their operational process, in evaluating the technical results produced by the projects by directly using ENTEL within a pilot stage.
Service/ system concept
ENTEL exploits the automated processing capabilities of Earth Observation data through Artificial Intelligence algorithms. The ENTEL project proposes a combined use of HR and VHR satellite data, Open data, and other geospatial data as part of a methodology that provides added-value information related to the characteristics of the territory, urban features, territorial and administrative constraints, man-made changes of the land cover. Moreover, ENTEL supports a smooth and easy integration within customer operational procedure.
Space Added Value
Currently, infrastructure operators mainly use seldom and non-uniform Earth Observation data and Geo-Information within planning, operation and management. Through ENTEL, EO data are efficiently exploited, in combination with various other data, for supporting the infrastructure life-cycle. The proposed service approach uses different data from EO satellites as a remote and reliable source of information, impacting on several service key points. EO satellite data, from both optical and radar sensors, provide specific added values in terms of multitemporal information on, for example, characteristics of the territory, land use, urban features, changes. Moreover, all the EO data information are processed in a fully automatic manner in order to make possible the smart integration of the different workflow steps.
Current Status
The project has completed the gathering of the user requirements. The implementation activity is ongoing.