Increased Decision Power with Integrated Digital Geospatial Solutions

In the power and utility industry geospatial satellite imagery has played an important role in enhancing productivity in site planning, site analysis and pipeline development. It has been a key asset in increasing productivity by achievement of goals with fewer resources.

For many companies it has been a key decision support tool to use in identifying what to avoid, what to take advantage of, and what problems may be encountered along the way. For example, with site planning it can identify key decision criteria for pre-planning of infrastructure development:

• What is the shortest distance from source to market?
• What is the least amount of trees that need to be cleared?
  
• How close am I to urban development?
  
• What costs am I going to occur to guarantee right of way?
  
• What are the terrain dynamics (slope, rock, soil) that impact laying of corridors?
  
• Can I use existing infrastructure pathways?
  
• What impact does the local environment have on restoration and environmental laws?

For financial planning and risk mitigation, satellite and aerial imagery is helpful in predicting areas of impact resulting from the remediation and emission of utilities. Such as:

• Is the company’s infrastructure at risk of causing significant environmental damage?
  
• What should be our environmental response action based upon terrain and demographics?
  
• What is the emergency evacuation plan-of-action in the event of a man-made or terrorist threat?
  
• What soil risk is undertaken in the instance of chemical bleeds, water resource impacts etc?

These decision points are enhanced by the use of satellite or aerial imagery, either as a means to create accurate base mapping of remote regions, identification and placement of infrastructure with its surrounding environment, classification of vegetation growth, or change detection over a period of time.

The benefit of using high-resolution geospatial imagery can be felt throughout an organization yet mostly, the use of geospatial imagery has remained in the hands of a few specialists and GIS experts. In part, cost of acquiring imagery, especially accurate high-resolution imagery has been a prohibitive factor. Typically, imagery has been supplied in raw forms and the processing requirement to produce decision support ready views or pictures required specialized skills and training. Alternatively, decision support tried to move to the free image portals but the accuracy of the imagery and the latency in its currency made it an ill-equipped tool for business-to-business image applications.

A new breed of geospatial imagery solution

A new breed of geospatial imagery solution has been evolving into the marketplace where owners of the satellites themselves realized that an expansion of its imagery was demanded, and that expansion had to be fueled by ways to lower the total cost of ownership throughout organizations such as conglomerate power and energy firms. Complete end-to-end solutions for enterprise use of imagery are now launching into the market place, led by DigitalGlobe, the leading provider of high-resolution satellite imagery. What DigitalGlobe realized its consumers required was a consistent layer of imagery but served up in a variety of easily consumable forms. The GIS specialist still needed its unprocessed imagery and the decision support groups needed the same imagery but served up in an orthorectified, web based solution which could easily integrated into standard GIS like those provided by ESRI, Autodesk and MapInfo.

At the same time, commercial satellite companies have had to review the model for how it collected imagery since the demand for imagery has been growing, in part fueled by Virtual Earth Imagery sites, while capacity has remained constrained. As part of the transition companies with the production capabilities of DigitalGlobe have moved to collecting and creating base layers of worldwide imagery and points of interest, and identifying strategic collections with major organizations and resellers to overlay into standard base layers. The content collection and integration strategies are then supported by a variety of easy to use discovery and publications tools that means that companies are servicing the same imagery throughout the organization but in the form, time-horizon and access method required by the individual end user.

Increasing the immediate availability of high-resolution imagery

ImageConnect™ is an example of one of the solutions developed by DigitalGlobe. It is a plug-in for GIS that connects GIS to the world’s largest online library of high-resolution earth imagery from both satellite and aerial collection sources owned and operated by DigitalGlobe.

Tapping into the power and simplicity of ImageConnect

As one of America’s top research facilities, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is constantly pioneering new ways ensure national security and apply science and technology. According to Lynn Wilder, head of the GIS Group, ImageConnect plays a key role in satisfying the spatial information needs of the Lab. “Whether it’s for homeland defense projects or environmental and civil engineering projects, ImageConnect has been a powerful solution for our satellite and aerial imagery needs. We’ve got over 7000 people here, and our department does GIS for people across the whole lab.”

According to Lynn, ImageConnect has contributed to greater effectiveness and saved money in several areas:

Homeland security

Whether they’re using the ImageConnect extensions in 2D ArcMap projects, or creating advanced 3D models with ArcGlobe, instant online imagery from DigitalGlobe’s database has made Livermore’s ability to do virtual simulations and area analysis more efficient, effective and inexpensive.

“We bring in a lot of DigitalGlobe images and drape them over digital elevation models, and are able to do wonderful 3D fly-throughs in areas of interest to us,” said Lynn. “It’s so powerful when you’ve got a researcher next to you and you can bring in their data, let’s say a sensor location, and just hit the ImageConnect download button and boom – here’s everything around the sensor. It’s been so powerful!”

Civil projects

ImageConnect recently came in handy when the labs were working with PG&E to look for vegetation changes around natural gas pipelines as a way to detect leaks. “ImageConnect’s high resolution photos allowed me to follow the path of the pipeline. I could see the disturbed earth and instantly gather coordinate points for it so that we could do further analysis.”

Environmental projects

In conjunction with the California Energy Commission, the labs also oversee a number of wind farms in the Northwest, like the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area east of the Labs, and ImageConnect is a key tool in the process of maintaining and installing turbines.

“We’re in a process of replacing smaller turbines with newer, more efficient ones. The high resolution of Digitalglobe’s library recently helped us to digitize over 1000 turbines over a very short period of time by viewing them in the photos.”

ImageConnect has also helped the GIS department with a number of watershed modeling projects in ArcGlobe. “We use ImageConnect to help calculate flow and know more about areas of interest. Digitalglobe imagery is such a great complement to the Forest Service stream gauge data. Is a given area rocky or covered with trees? And how might this influence flow of water into the watershed? We can know instantly.”

ImageConnect provided Livermore Labs with a number of key benefits for its use with power and energy research projects including:

Spatial accuracy: “The spatial accuracy, high resolution, and excellent contrast in Digitalglobe’s data is remarkable, and often helps us do ground truthing. Whether we are working with stream gauges, military sites, or wind farms, we’re constantly using it for correcting and improving various spatial databases.”

Ease of installation & use: “It was so easy to get ImageConnect going. We literally had it up and running in minutes and started to use it right away.”

Value: “DigitalGlobe’s service has been very cost-efficient for us. We only pay for what we actually use.”

Selection: “We often take advantage of all of the different versions of imagery available over a given area. We can do time-change analyses using the different versions of imagery available to us, and we’ve even used it to do analyses of traffic in and out of chemical plants”

DigitalGlobe is the industry leader of geospatial content, products and related services. It provides centralized advanced web imagery solutions for professional organizations which need to distribute and support high-resolution earth imagery across the enterprise, including access for large groups of remote and field based teams. Its large collection capacity from its satellite constellation of Quickbird and Worldview-1, together with its aerial collection program ensure that is has the broadest depth of global coverage suitable to energy and power company applications. With over 360 million sq km2 of global high resolution imagery available in its ImageLibrary, refreshed annually with 70 million sq km2 sq of new imagery, it offers a lower total cost of ownership for imagery projects which involve ongoing monitoring across large spans of geographic area. It is focused on providing earth imagery of the highest possible quality and accuracy through its technology advanced collection programs, its ground stations, and its image production capabilities.

DigitalGlobe provides instant, easy to use access to its ImageLibrary through on-demand services for enterprise applications, desktop software, web-enabled services, cell phones, PDAs and GPS systems. For those situations that demand the utmost level of disaster recovery, it offers an offline viewer deployable to field operators and service technicians. All of these products have access to a centralized ImageLibrary of the most accurate, up-to-date imagery commercially available today. The centralization of quality imagery into one-end-to end solution provides great benefit to energy and utility companies whose disparate workforce, in the field, headquarters or decision support operations, can tap into a consistent set of up to date images and access it in the method that suites them best but all knowing that they are utilizing the same set of data to provide optimal impact to their projects.

For more information, contact DigitalGlobe at (001) 800 655 7929 or www.digitalglobe.com