ABOUT THIS EPISODE
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
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Overstory: https://www.overstory.com/
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Lynn Petesch on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnpetesch/
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Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-8b612114
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Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, and welcome to the summer edition of Think Energy. We are officially in podcast vacation mode. So while our normal day-to-day work continues, we're taking a brief pause from our kind of regularly scheduled episodes to recharge, to think about what's coming up in the year ahead content-wise, and just do some planning. But while we do so, we don't want to leave you without anything to listen to, so we look back at some of our favorite insights and episodes over the past year, and that is our summer rewind. So this summer, we're tackling a pretty significant and overarching theme that's really defining the current state of the energy transition, and that is the collision between digital infrastructure and physical infrastructure as it relates to our energy grid. It's this really kind of fascinating look at old versus new, traditional versus up-and-coming, and how we progress to meet the energy needs of our customer base, the growing energy needs as we electrify, as we, you know, expand, while also implementing new technology to protect our grid, protect our assets, to better manage things. So it's kind of a common theme in a lot of episodes that we have done in the last little while and a lot of the conversations that we're having. So in Part 1 today, we're kicking things off with a look at the physical world of our grid and how we're using new technology to protect it, and that is our conversation with Overstory. So we'll re-examine how we use high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to act as kind of a shield almost, you know, helping utilities proactively manage our vegetation and reduce vegetation-to-powerline contact, which can reduce power outages, wildfires in many cases, and really has been an important tool for us here at Hydro Ottawa as well as in the utility industry more broadly. So sit back and have a listen to my conversation with Lynn Pedesch from Overstory, and enjoy this summer rewind.
[00:02:26] Trevor Feeman: Welcome to Think Energy, the podcast that dives into the fast-changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and people on the frontlines 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.
[00:02:58] Trevor Freeman: Hi everyone, welcome back. Today on Think Energy, 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's 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. Now why? Because trees contacting 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 stance. 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 a 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 caused considerable damage to our city's urban forest. 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 a thousand 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 other utilities, helping us identify and act to mitigate risk associated with vegetation, I'm really excited to have Lynn Pedesch 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 Pedesch, welcome to the show.
[00:08:05] Lynn Pedesch: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:08:07] Trevor Freeman: 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.
[00:08:15] Lynn Pedesch: 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 that is a concern, and/or improving operational efficiencies. So Overstory very much becomes a decision-making tool for their programs. We're 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 a storm, they might be working on a wildfire mitigation risk. So the company more broadly was founded in 2018 by Aniek 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.
[00:10:14] Trevor Freeman: 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?
[00:10:52] Lynn Pedesch: 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 closely with customers, solving problems. And about four years ago, I decided that I did want to focus the rest of my career on solving the climate crisis more broadly. And I remember very clearly that I came across Overstory and there were two things that really resonated with me. One was hearing that utility-caused wildfires could be a thing of the past—like they are preventable—and the other thing was learning about this world where vegetation is the biggest cause of outages, which is, you know, I did not know before! And so I think, you know, having these very clear goals is very compelling to kind of work on something where it's so easy to understand what the big problems are. So I joined Overstory, and for the last couple of years, I've been building a team that gets really deeply embedded in these utilities, specifically with the vegetation management and the wildfire mitigation teams. And we work on their programs, we understand their programs, we help them reshape their programs, we roll out obviously the software element that is Overstory. It's been very fun and rewarding work.
[00:12:30] Trevor Freeman: That's great. And I really love, you know, talking to people from a variety of areas that touch on climate change and the climate crisis, and I think there's a bunch of us who share that passion of wanting to do something. I spoke with a group of recent grads about what a green career, what a career in climate change looks like, and really it looks like whatever you want it to look like. There are so many aspects that touch on this. So kind of neat to hear how that was your passion and then you figured out where it made sense for you to enter into the climate sphere, so that's great.
[00:13:06] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I guess when I was young, I thought you had to be a scientist to work on climate, and I think now anyone can find an angle on how to contribute to it, and I think everyone needs to help contribute.
[00:13:15] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, any job can be a green job if you care about it and if you make it that. Okay, so let me get back to Overstory. Tell us a little bit about the evolution of the company. You talked about it kind of founding about seven years ago. Tell us how it's evolved and progressed over those seven years.
[00:13:30] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, so when we started working with utilities, I think at that point everyone was kind of assessing whether satellites could be a good use case for analyzing vegetation. We're now talking about 30-centimeter imagery, so the resolution of satellites has become incredible. You can really see branches, you can detect species of trees, you can see if they're healthy or not. So initially that was kind of our MO. We really were the leading provider to find out where the trees are, how close they are in terms of proximity to your network, so to the conductor, which is the risk. You know, we're looking at the terrain. If you're looking in the mountains in Colorado, you have very different terrain than maybe in Ottawa. So, you know, detecting tree species has been really interesting, detecting the health of trees, and how that decline is furthering. A lot of utilities are experiencing a lot of tree decline, die-off right now. So that was how we started. And then we started working with the really big utilities, and you had to think about this problem at scale. Now we might be scanning with satellites tens of thousands of miles at a time. And some of these utilities, they might have thousands, if not tens of thousands of trees that could pose a risk to their network. They might have had a really big, large weather event, a storm that knocked over some of their system. So at that point, it all becomes about that decisioning tool. Everything starts becoming a priority. And I think that's now where we're really leaning into, is making not just surfacing the data, but making it very actionable. Utilities have a lot to deal with. They deal with very tight budgets, they deal with crew constraints, they might have an aging workforce, there's regulatory pressure, they're really vulnerable to storms, increasingly there's a lot of wildfire exposure. So everything becomes a decision of where should I focus my attention, where can I get the biggest bang for my buck, what should I do, what should I not focus on. And that decisioning is where we really want to be a key player in.
[00:15:47] Trevor Freeman: Absolutely. And looking forward, I know we're jumping the gun here, we haven't gotten into the details of what you do, but looking forward, what is your vision for kind of the future of this space and how it's going to continue to evolve? Are you mature as a company yet or as a sector, or is there still a lot of growth to happen?
[00:16:04] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I think the vast majority of utilities are now leveraging remote sensing. It could be LiDAR, it could be drones, it could be satellites, so that has become a pretty established tooling within the sector. I think what our vision really is, is providing utilities that share resilience-first picture of risk. So, you know, we imagine a world where you can kind of see the emerging risks and you can start becoming proactive. Being proactive in this space of vegetation management has been really challenging. You never know where the next tree is going to fall, and over the last couple of years, customers suddenly have access to this risk across the territory so they can start being proactive about it. As a matter of fact, that was a key use case also with the team at Hydro Ottawa, is to start launching these proactive programs. And I think when we think about it, we get very excited about the world in which anyone from the field crews to the vegetation managers to the operation folks to the execs to the regulators, the community partners who think about the safety of their communities, all have that kind of shared view of risk. Just imagine, they all understand the same risk, they operate off the same sheet, and they make the same data-driven decisions. That could solve a lot of problems, because right now the data is often scrambled across different people—certain people have access to it, and certain people don't.
[00:17:33] Trevor Freeman: Great. Okay, so let's get into the specifics here. I want to actually talk about specifically what Overstory does. How do you find—we've kind of talked about vegetation management, obviously you're supporting Hydro Ottawa and other utilities in our vegetation management programs—how do you find and tag high-risk vegetation? What is high risk? Like, what do you actually do on a day-to-day basis?
[00:17:58] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, that's the part that I deal with the most often! So excited to get into the specifics. Implementing with Overstory is actually pretty easy. I mean, when we start working with a customer, we need to know where your grid is, so we need to understand where your power lines are running. We need to understand the main configurations of them, you know, how tall are the poles, etc., so we can really compute that whole focus of where the trees are in relation to your power lines, to your conductors. That's all ultimately that we're focusing on. Increasingly, we're also focusing on the ground, I'll be talking about that as well. We then task these satellites over your territory. We do that during the leaf-on season, so that will be the summer, essentially. And then we run all these models. So we first need to understand where the trees are, what is their height, and what is their health. An unhealthy tree is much more likely to fall and cause damage to your power lines. We're looking at the fuels on the ground. We can help you determine what type of equipment you might need to attack certain types of vegetation, and we always compute that risk to the conductor, and we look at your right-of-ways. Now, I think the interesting part about your question is what is high risk, and that can be very different across different utilities. And I think that's the maybe unique part with Overstory, is that we can configure it to your standards. So every utility has very unique components. If you're on the West Coast and you're concerned about wildfires, your tolerance to risk will be very different than if you're on the East Coast where you're mostly concerned about not causing too many outages. Including that, you might have specific trimming specifications. The crews run around with chainsaws, they know exactly how far out they need to trim, how much they can trim, and there's a bit of a risk tolerance thing. So we build very configurable risk frameworks for all of our utility partners, so "high" means one thing to Hydro Ottawa, means something different to a customer in California that is facing a very different type of risk.
[00:20:04] Trevor Freeman: So you're out there assessing, essentially just for the context of our listeners, you know, we've got power lines that run overhead, they run through residential neighborhoods, commercial areas, but also forested areas, treed areas where there's lots of vegetation near our equipment. Your company really gets an understanding of the interaction between the vegetation and our lines, and says these ones are too close, or this is a tree that's, you know, not healthy and could come in contact with your lines based on your analysis. So help us, like let's paint that picture a little bit more detailed. How do utility companies take the information that you are coming up with, that your analysis is coming up with, and use that to run a vegetation management program more effectively? What does a utility do with that information?
[00:20:56] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, so we always center it around four main use cases. One is optimizing a program that already exists, it's creating a targeted program for you, it's quantifying your work, and risk reporting. And I'll dive into each and every one of them a little bit to illustrate a bit more what that could mean. So when we think about program optimization, a lot of utilities have existing vegetation management cycle, they might have a regulatory obligation to visit their territory every four years, for example. Now a lot of times, they've been doing their program the same way for the last 10, maybe 20 years, but the conditions in their territory are different, right? I mean, the things we're seeing, the storms are heavier, there's more tree decline that we're seeing right now. So they know they need to adapt and they need to adjust it, but it's big programs with lots of budgets attached to it, a lot of crews running around, so starting to think about how you can start pulling a circuit that you're meant to trim forward, or starting to tackle an area where you say is more residential, there's fewer trees, focusing on your high-risk areas first, re-managing these programs is one key component that we work with a lot of companies on, and thinking about Oklahoma Gas and Electric, for example, that they have a budget and they can only do that much with the budget, and it was really about reinventing where they can get the biggest impact. The second use case is this targeted program creation, and I'll use the Hydro Ottawa use case for that. You know, they suddenly had a view about where all of their hazard trees are. Hazard trees are these trees that are declining, they're dying or they're dead, and they could have an impact on your system. Now suddenly you know where they are, so you can start building a targeted program about dedicating some time and budget and crews to actually going and addressing those trees. That has a big impact on your reliability and on reducing tree-caused outages. And there's many others, sort of like hot-spotting is a very common term about starting to become proactive and doing something for a specific program. The third use case is work quantification, and I think there, when you think about it again, there's large contractors that are running around managing your territory, and now utilities for the first time often have that data to actually assess how much work there is. So that's really helpful in terms of negotiating your contracts, getting better bids. Some utilities say it's pretty hard to find contractors that want to work on their system because it's very hard to estimate how much work there is. Or they might have a budget to mow certain vegetation along a transmission corridor. Just knowing how much vegetation there is is a really helpful tool to address it and prioritize it in the right way. And then the fourth use case is risk reporting, and that is about getting that baseline view about your risk and tracking it year-over-year. And this is really where we want utilities to have that data to report it out to their boards, insurers, regulators, and often it's used to defend your budget, secure your budgets, or really have some data to kind of back you up on what the problems are that you're facing.
[00:24:26] Trevor Freeman: Great. So you talk about data, and, you know, each of those use cases that you mentioned or strategies that you mentioned really are about getting the right information in the hands of the right people to make decisions and sort of more efficiently and effectively make decisions. But it's a lot of data. And so Hydro Ottawa has over 6,000 kilometers of lines, you know this of course as our partner. We have a big territory and we have a fairly treed territory. That's a lot of data points. You're collecting a lot of data from your satellites, you're doing analysis on that. How are you doing that analysis? Is it—you know, AI is kind of a buzzword in every sector right now, and the utility sector's no different. Are you using some form of AI or machine learning analytics? What are you doing in terms of, you know, crunching the numbers and coming up with the right actions?
[00:25:25] Lynn Pedesch: Totally. Yeah, AI is a buzzword, but it's also very exciting. I think utilities have really embraced it already. They're using it for demand forecasting, they're using it for customer service, they're using it for asset planning. I mean, at the core, Overstory has been using AI to turn remote sensing data into operationally useful intelligence about their vegetation. So when you say, yes, Hydro Ottawa has that many thousands of kilometers of overhead lines, we need to rank it to them: This is your worst circuit, this is your worst area, this is the area where you have the most hazard trees, for example. So we can really rank order on a span level from the worst to the best, right? So that could be one thing. It's still an overwhelming amount of data. So where we started by using AI to kind of predict where the trees are, how tall are they, what was their relation to the conductors, now what we're really excited about or kind of leaning into with AI is how to intelligently kind of assess and prioritize risk. So not every hazard tree has the same impact. If a hazard tree falls on a line where more houses are dependent on, you will knock out the power of more people. So it's always a prioritization exercise, and leveraging AI for that is what is most exciting to us right now. And I think it's important to note that we also don't just want it to be a black box. All of the models we've built, they're always validated by certified arborists and kind of our utility partners, and I think at this stage, this is very important, because every tree that we find exists in the real world, and so validating this AI with ground-truthing has been really important for us to also build that trust in the technology.
[00:27:14] Trevor Freeman: That's great. And I do think it's helpful for our listeners to kind of understand the context before this. This work is sort of done—you know, in the absence of a tool like yours, it's sort of done, you know, there's a degree of manual effort here. There's a degree of patrolling the lines, there's a cycle of vegetation management. So if you've done a line this year, in three years or four years or five years, you want to be looking at it again. This takes a little bit of that—I don't want to call it guesswork, but it takes a little bit of that manual effort out of the equation and really focuses efforts in the right way, and it's only with the tools that, you know, you folks are using that you're able to do that volume of analysis and get that pinpoint accuracy. So that's fantastic. Let me get into the success of it all, like the big picture. We've obviously talked a couple times here that you're our partner here at Hydro Ottawa, so I know the success that we're having with you, but, you know, tell us some of the great success stories with other utility partners. Are you actually reducing weather-related outages? Are you seeing the impact of using the Overstory tools and methodology to support utility partners?
[00:28:28] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah. I mean, weather-related outages can mean many things. You have trees knocking over, like the pole might crack, etc. You know, those, there's a lot of things that can happen during a storm, and I've heard a lot of stories about some of the storms that Ottawa has experienced in the past years where, you know, you could have had anything and they're just heavier and the consequences are really strong. But what we can impact is the tree-caused outages. And that we've proven with Hydro Ottawa where, within a year, by focusing that targeted program on going to an area where you had a massive amount of these trees that were dying off, and at any point with just a little bit too heavy wind could be toppled over and fall on the line, we had a 44% reduction in tree-caused outages. That's a real, tangible number you can see. I'm thinking about a utility as well on the East Coast, a co-op that runs through very rural areas. In those areas, you have trees outside of the right-of-way that are toppling over onto lines, so tree-caused outages are a huge issue for them and it's really impacting their SAIDI and SAIFI, those key KPIs that utilities are always tracking. And by us just giving them a rank order of which hazard tree—they had so many of them—which hazard tree to even go to first, because if that hazard tree were to fall on a line, a ton more people are going to be out of power than if the other one were to fall on the line where you will have like one rural cabin that will not have power. That led to a reduction of something around 90% of tree-caused outages to 70%. It's still a long way to go, but it was a really tangible number that you can see, and it shows that if you then do that proactive work, you have a real impact on your tree-caused outages. And if I think about our customers in California, Pacific Gas and Electric for example, it's a lot about helping them understand where they don't need to go. So it's kind of doing something of a visual inspection and actually skipping certain spans. That can be in itself a really big use case, because right now, if you don't have an understanding about where your risks are, you might be sending trucks to roll for hours around areas where there is not really any tangible work to be done. So redirecting them to the right areas is where we've seen a lot of success there, and that obviously leads to budget wins, right? You'll be saving a lot of money by doing that, and those are kind of the use cases that we chase and that we kind of help prove the cases on.
[00:31:07] Trevor Freeman: Absolutely. Yeah, there's only so many resources you can throw at this, and making sure that we prioritize and focus those resources in the right spot is absolutely critical. You were just talking about the West Coast and you mentioned this earlier, I know wildfires is an area that is obviously of great interest for your organization. We're fortunate here at Hydro Ottawa in that we haven't really had to deal with that much, but anybody who's, you know, following the news knows this is a major problem for us. So how, what is your role in helping those utilities prevent wildfires? Maybe give us a very quick primer on why utilities are a factor when it comes to wildfires first, and then how your organization is supporting that.
[00:31:52] Lynn Pedesch: So unfortunately, utility-caused wildfires tend to be the most catastrophic wildfires because they're critical infrastructure, and we've obviously seen that happen across the world and in the US recently again and again. But utility-caused wildfires, as I said at the beginning, are also the actual wildfires that are preventable. So that's really where we're lying into. A lot of the forests right now, they've become tinderboxes. That is obviously because of fire suppression policies, that's because of forest management techniques that have been leveraged in the last couple of hundred years that are slowly changing at a different pace. Canada's had some, unfortunately, some really bad fire seasons recently as well. And so where Overstory wanted to place itself is in that prevention space—to even not get to the point where you have a spark, because there's a lot of tools out there that focus on mitigation and what do you do when you see that first plume of smoke coming up, and so we've landed in kind of really focusing on the prevention side so that utilities are hopefully in the future not the ones that spark any of those catastrophic wildfires. We've already always been looking at the vegetation that could touch your conductor, right? That I've been speaking about a lot. But now we're really excited for the first time and we recently announced that we launched a fuel detection model. So that's us looking at the ground fuel conditions, and those are actually usually the key contributors to the spark that spreads the fire. We're now providing that to utilities as a much higher resolution than ever before. For me, it's interesting cause I've spent a lot of time looking at trees, and now I'm going into the field and I'm looking at the ground, and it's a new perspective! But yet again, we could just, you know, we don't want to overwhelm our customers with a lot of maps and showing the fuel conditions necessarily, we can really help them identify those spans where a single failure would have the greatest consequence. So yet again, it's about how to make that data—there's a lot of wildfire risk maps out there—but make it a very actionable list of spans that if they were to tackle those, they are very proactively reducing the risk of igniting a fire and as a result obviously protecting their communities.
[00:34:10] Trevor Freeman: Got it. So it's not just about the overhead trees, branches, etc., contacting the line, it's, you know, if a switch goes, if an insulator pops, if something happens that will cause sparks, what's happening on the ground below that line, and how do we make sure it is able to withstand sparks that might happen.
[00:34:29] Lynn Pedesch: Exactly. If you have dry grasses, if you have sagebrush, if you have certain types of fuels, they're just much more likely to spark a fire and then spread out without there even being any trees. You have these prairies along Texas that can blow up in a fire very quickly, and the fires can spread to tremendous sizes. And so understanding the fuels on the ground is really important.
[00:34:55] Trevor Freeman: Super interesting and fascinating, fascinating work to get involved in. As you mentioned, this is obviously an area of, I don't even know if I'd call it growing concern anymore, great concern for the utility industry and all of us. So with the technology that's, you know, we talked about AI a little bit ago, it's literally growing before our eyes, it's really evolving fast. Do you see your technology evolving along with it? What's kind of next for your organization? You talked about getting into sort of the ground vegetation management—what comes next? How do you see it evolving as AI and tools evolve?
[00:35:32] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I mean, if we see that the future is where we want to support a grid that is much safer and reliable as I mentioned, we also want to make sure it's resilient to the climate and the economic pressures that there are. So our initial focus and our continued focus and where we have a lot of our expertise has been with vegetation. Now we're starting to look at the ground fuels, then that naturally evolves into looking at the asset vulnerabilities, so, you know, the actual poles and if there's any failures potentially on those, as well as further weather exposures, right? It becomes then about the soil moisture, it becomes about the wind speed, it becomes about the rain precipitation, etc. So there's a myriad of things that we can start looking at and that we want to start looking at in order to get that more holistic view of risk and go beyond just vegetation. Right now where we're investing most heavily in is that wildfire risk. There's also the resolution that we see with satellites right now is at 30 centimetres, that might drop down to 15 or 10 centimetres, so the resolution will get higher. There's other sources that we're exploring already, sometimes flying aerial imagery that is at 5 to 15 centimetres. Then you really start seeing—then you can start seeing a leaf on a tree! It gets really impressive. There's LiDAR, there's lots of other kinds of remote sensing technologies that we're looking to leverage in the future. And then as a company as well, we're starting to obviously also expand internationally. We started working with utilities in New Zealand that have very similar problems and various regulatory changes, they also have a problem with wildfire risk. So that is another angle that at Overstory we're chasing right now.
[00:37:18] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that understanding of other assets beyond just vegetation has kind of been running through my head of—we talk about, and I think we've talked about it here on the show, if we haven't I should do an episode on that, like a digital twin. A digital twin of our grid, and really having a good understanding of not just, you know, a line drawn on a map of, "Hey, your circuits run this way," but really physically what's happening out there and it being able to sort of model that, interact with it in a digital way to understand if we do X, Y, and Z, what happens. So the technology that you guys are using to really get good imagery and understanding of what's out there, I think what I'm hearing from you is that could potentially be leveraged in that next level to understand what poles do we have, what health are they in, what's happening with that conductor, is it sagging too much, is it in good health, like there's all this opportunity. That's really fascinating to hear.
[00:38:15] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, already now when we look at transmission corridors, we look at the sag of these lines, and the terrains are also really challenging things to look at. So there's a lot of factors that need to be taken into account, and that can only expand as we want to look at risk more beyond just the vegetation element.
[00:38:34] Trevor Freeman: Very cool. Well, Lynn, very, very interesting to hear this. I'm really glad you came on the show today to talk to us. Fascinating to hear what Overstory's up to. I know that we're super excited to be working with you here at Hydro Ottawa, and excited for what comes next. We always end our interviews with a series of questions, so I'm going to dive into those, and here we go. What is a book that you've read that you think everyone should read?
[00:39:00] Lynn Pedesch: I was thinking about an author more than a book. My favorite author is Jonathan Franzen. If I would recommend one book, it'd probably be The Corrections, his most famous one, I believe. But they're like these chunky 800-900 page books where you kind of get immersed in these families and you feel like you know them at the end, and then they kind of, I think about them for like months afterward! They're really good reading, at least for the winter when it's cold and you spend a lot of time inside, so probably Jonathan Franzen's books, yeah.
[00:39:31] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, we're recording this just before the holidays and I think we'll be releasing the episode after, but winter is such a great time to curl up with a book and it's awesome to have a good recommendation of a nice thick book.
[00:39:41] Lynn Pedesch: It'll still be cold in January, especially in Ottawa!
[00:39:44] Trevor Freeman: Absolutely, absolutely. So, same question, but a movie or a show?
[00:39:49] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I'm not a big movie buff, but I recently rewatched What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I don't know if you've seen it, with Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, and I always felt like Leonardo DiCaprio should have received an Oscar for that performance back when he was 14, but yeah, it's a beautiful movie.
[00:40:07] Trevor Freeman: Oh, nice! Yeah, that's a bit of a blast from the past, but you're right, that is a fantastic one. If someone offered you a free round-trip flight anywhere in the world, where would you go?
[00:40:17] Lynn Pedesch: French Polynesia, because it's so far, I've never been. I had a friend who went, and I'm sure it's very expensive to go there, so it'd be great for someone to pay! Yeah, no, that's a place I'll go one day, so yeah.
[00:40:31] Trevor Freeman: Fantastic. Who is someone that you admire?
[00:40:34] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, that's a tricky one because I was thinking about people in my family, etc., but if I were to think about a public persona—and also a bit of a blast from the past—I'll think about Tina Turner. She's been my icon since I'm a kid. I was always listening with my dad to Tina Turner. And I think the word that I've probably most used in today's episode was like "resilience," and I always think about her as like possibly the most resilient woman in the world who reinvented herself and her career in her 40s and 50s, and is this complete power woman, you know, always done everything at her own terms. So I get so much energy from, not just her music, I've seen so many documentaries about her, and she's always been this kind of woman that fills you with energy and kind of drives you. So, I'm a big, big fan of Tina Turner.
[00:41:28] Trevor Freeman: That's fantastic. I have to say, that's never come up on the show before, and now I need to go and dive down a rabbit hole of learning about Tina Turner and listening to some music. That's a really good answer. Last question: What's something about the energy sector or, let me expand that to kind of the climate sector, that you're really excited about?
[00:41:47] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, I'm going to take a very high level, but I think the thing I've been following the most is like that broad topic of the energy transition, and I think the recent changes or like kind of the way we talk about it has become a lot more interesting because it used to be this kind of fluffy, big kind of vision, and now we're in that phase where it just has to be very practically implemented. And we're trudging along with it, no matter the political climate, etc., there is kind of a move forward. And I actually really like the way that, I think when I first started learning about it or getting interested in it, it was always about renewables, and now it's around just sort of like needing to build a system that is both like low carbon and climate resilient, and there's something in that like way we talk about it now that I find really interesting. There's immense amounts of innovation in it, so, yeah, I'm just enjoying following what's happening on that and how we are moving that direction no matter what's happening right now, so that's exciting.
[00:42:48] Trevor Freeman: Yeah, good one. I know my listeners are probably rolling their eyes because I say this all the time, but it's a very exciting time to be in this industry, and very exciting to kind of see the evolution of energy and how we're interacting with it, how it's impacting our society. It really feels like we're at an inflection point, and very great to have you working on one aspect of that that people probably don't think about a lot, so thanks very much for what you're doing.
[00:43:13] Lynn Pedesch: Yeah, exactly! When you start working for Overstory, the one thing that happens is wherever you go, you see trees and power lines, and I have a very keen eye for, unfortunately, trees that are in poor health right now, so that's one of the professional things I've developed.
[00:43:28] Trevor Freeman: You carry like a spool of red ribbon around, you can tie on the at-risk trees, just so someone could come along! Lynn, thanks so much for coming on the show today, really appreciate it. It's been great chatting with you.
[00:43:38] Lynn Pedesch: Thank you so much. Take care.
[00:43:40] Trevor Freeman: Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Think Energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review—it really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments, or an idea for a show or a guest. You can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.
