International Conference on Condition Monitoring, Diagnosis and Maintenance CMDM 2013

B2-58
Advances in Vegetation Management to improve Reliability
J. Gomes-Mota1, F. Azevedo2, J. Casaca3, V. Almeida1, N. Pinho da Silva1, L.
Campos-Pinto3
1
2
Albatroz Engineering, CENTRIA-FCT-Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 3RENRede Elctrica Nacional
Portugal
SUMMARY
Incidents associated to vegetation in the Portuguese transmission grid have
decreased from one of the major causes to negligible impact in less than a decade. This
was due to the cumulative effect of four independent, yet concurrent, programs: 1)
routine clearance inspections with LiDAR, extended to the whole grid, provided
quantitative measures associated with degrees of severity for each hazardous tree; 2)
classification of the right-of-way according to land use, density of vegetation and
classification of tree growth rates; 3) targeted actions consisting of tree trimming,
pruning and cutting with priorities set by severity and criticality of each Over Head Line
[OHL]; 4) public policies to create secondary routes to remove biomass from the forests
that mandated the Transmission System Operator [TSO] clear paths around OHL.
The Portuguese TSO (REN Rede Elctrica Nacional) operates a grid of
8443km of OHL with three voltage levels and incurs significant investment and
operation costs to achieve and maintain vegetation incidents at a very low level. Thus, a
program to supersede existing blind systematic actions with probability based
approaches leading to risk based management was launched. This combines information
from the four programs with environmental, reliability and asset management data with
third party information. Given that the outcome (incidents due to vegetation) is already
at an optimal level, the current research will try to optimize the process as well.
KEYWORDS
Vegetation Management, LiDAR inspections, Classification of the right-of-way,
Biomass, Risk based management, Inspection and Maintenance Optimization
INTRODUCTION
Vegetation affects OHL operation in multiple ways. The most direct one is tree
growth that could lead to phase to ground faults (and possibly, forest fires) if left
unchecked. The second results from forest fires around OHL: firemen acting against fire
causes line outages and high temperatures triggered by the proximity of the fire ionizes
the surrounding air, tripping the line. Three lesser effects are also worth mentioning: tall
trees around OHL modify the wind cooling patterns; forests and vegetation attract
wildlife which can disturb energy supply due to droppings on the insulators, accidental
gomes.mota@albatroz-eng.com

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collisions or nest building; the nature of sail and vegetation determines how the land around OHL is
used and some human activities can also trigger events or failures.
Most of these effects can be minimized if proper inspection and maintenance is performed on
the grid. This has been the effort of REN and the reliability indexes since 1995 [1] show evidence of
the results of these policies as the Average Interruption Time (AIT) due to all causes decreased from
7.98 minutes in 1995 to 0.0 minutes in 2012. Thus, REN maintenance practices proved their
effectiveness while maintaining costs within the regulatory requirements. The goal now is to strive for
even higher efficiency while preserving the quality of service.
During this period some rare events occurred and they emphasize the need to monitor natural
causes: a stork-induced fault in 2000 led to an AIT of 23.07 minutes; a sequence of forest fires in 2003
caused an AIT of 11.91 minutes. Other causes also trigger rare events: a conductor rupture led to the
loss of 6.1 minutes of AIT in 2004, although only one client was affected; an incident traveling from
Ems River (northern Germany) in November 2006 caused an AIT of 2.74 minutes; in later years even
rare events have caused shorter AITs.
Figure 1 shows the evolution of AIT since 1995. The bottom bars (dark blue) represent
incidents occurred in normal operation. The top bars (light blue) represent extraordinary events that lie
outside regulatory boundaries and force majeure, that, according to regulation directives are the
circumstances whose responsibility is not of transmission grid (fortuitous reasons, safety reasons,
public interest reasons, among others). Figure 2 shows the number of faults per 100km of circuit on the
three voltage levels (150kV, 220kV and 400kV) and the global grid index. Since a unique cause can
lead to multiple cascading faults, even a small number of unique causes leads to significant variations
in the index per voltage level per year.

Figure 1 Average Interruption Time [AIT]

in minutes

Figure 2 Faults originating in RNT lines

per 100km of circuit

The following sections describe how each of the four measures contributes to the clear
downward trend in the fault rate and, more significantly, on AIT: even if one cannot prevent every fault,
one should shield the clients from its consequences.
ROUTINE CLEARANCE (RIGHT-OF-WAY) INSPECTIONS
The routine clearance LiDAR inspection program is one of the four programs that concurred to
take the outages due to vegetation to negligible levels. The most recent circuit tripping associated to
vegetation occurred in October 2009. REN performs routine clearance right-of-way [ROW] inspections

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over the whole grid; ROW data is acquired by the ASLMS [2], an airborne LiDAR clearance inspection
system designed for vegetation maintenance. This system also collects location and navigation data,
allowing automatic data processing, as part of the Power Line Maintenance Inspection system (PLMI)
[3]. The result is a list of Points of Interest (PoIs), such as abnormal clearance of trees and other
obstacles from the conductors.
Video recording, also geo-referenced, is combined with LiDAR and third party data to offer
better insight into the environment around the lines. The combination of inspection data with
geographic information data and asset data in timelines with human expertise is used to estimate
vegetation species and growth rate, observe and measure how they depend on weather variables that
change across the years. Such classifications are useful to predict the evolution over time on a single
location and to compare similar PoIs across the territory in comparable time intervals.
According to users preferences, inspections reports can have different output file formats,
depending on the intended use. For instance: XLS files are associated with spreadsheets and are used
for numerical calculations and aggregations to compute probability of failure and risk indexes from the
individual PoI towards a whole installation: a circuit or an OHL (see Classification section). KML
files are a type of XML used for geographic information systems to display text, numerical and media
information about individual PoI. Figure 3 illustrates on such application with Google Earth. This
favors individual analysis of PoI and neighboring local effects, such as agriculture and human
activities. GPS files are used to direct maintenance teams to PoI and they are sorted according to nature
and severity (see Selective maintenance section). HTML files are used for comprehensive reporting
of all figures and images and they are also used for training and to document maintenance programs.

Figure 3Inspection Report on Google Earth, Preventive PoI sample

During inspection flight performed from an helicopter, the operator can use the on fly
interface for geo-referenced annotations to inspections data, e.g. vegetation pests. This kind of
information is important to understand and predict the vegetation behavior. The inspection reports
emphasize the PoIs description and associated operator annotations. The system integrates specific
thresholds for each types of obstacle, (e.g. vegetation, buildings, ground and roads) or line voltage and
was designed to meet RENs preferences that embody existing maintenance practices.

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For maintenance purposes, REN defined three levels of PoI severity: Non-conformity,
Predictive and Maintenance. This methodology is common to other inspection functions as the
common goal is to lead to probabilistic solutions to a unified status estimate as described in the
Classification section and in [4].
A Non-conformity PoI infringes regulations; it should be solved as soon as possible and no later
than three months after the inspection. A Predictive PoI meets regulation standards but falls on at least
one of the following conditions: it infringes the safety limits set by maintenance best practices; it could
infringe safety regulations under adverse events or combination of events; it is expected to evolve to
the Non-conformity level before the next inspection; it should be addressed within one year.
Maintenance PoIs meet regulation and safety limits set by TSO best practices, but should be considered
for maintenance if at least one of the conditions is met: it can evolve to a higher level before next
inspection; it is neighboring other higher severity PoI; it is associated with routine preventive
maintenance. Maintenance PoIs do not trigger any action but are used to feed routine maintenance
schedulers and estimate workloads for the next year, by the time they will be reassessed.
Besides supporting clearance measurements and grid reliability, ROW LiDAR inspections give
the possibility of monitoring compliance of outsourced maintenance activities in a selective framework.
Comparing different years' reports from the same OHL yields detailed estimates of vegetation growth
rate as a function of tree type, humidity, temperature and soil and calibrate third party models. The
ROW inspection reports are used in the classification process, as described next.
CLASSIFICATION OF VEGETATION: SEVERITY, GROWTH RATE
A selective process of ROW maintenance must rely on quantitative information about the ROW
clearance status quo and the prediction of its evolution. If the clearance inspection reports contain lists
of PoI where each vegetation entry depicts one object or cluster of objects, the vegetation
classification function uses the same data to produce a systematic classification of the scenarios around
OHLs. The approach accommodates any potential threat to the OHL that can be seen as a form of
obstacle. However, for the sake of interest to maintenance, this section focuses on the vegetation issues
only.
The elementary unit used is the line span: it is the swath of territory between two consecutive
towers, where the length is the distance between towers and the width is, at least, the clearance distance
defined by regulation and not wider than the region of interest defined by the TSO. In the case of REN,
the minimum width is 62m and the maximum width is set at 100m. As the constraints on land use
diminish as one moves from the projection of the line axis towards the periphery, the swath is divided
into narrower strips with different roles parameters. There are five areas: the central area which
corresponds to the vertical projection of the conductors; inner area, on each side, that corresponds to
the region from the central area to the limit set by regulations and outer area, on each side, that extends
from the regulation boundaries to the maximum width of the region interest defined by the TSO. For
each span, three characteristic variables are computed: 1) the urban type of the span; 2) the density of
vegetation cover and 3) the dominant vegetation growth rate. The classification of each line follows
by considering it as a sequence of spans.
The urban type is defined in one of three levels of construction occupation: rural if buildings are
absent or very sparse (only fences or constructions below 3m height without permanent human use);
mixed if there are some constructions but it is still possible to operate or maintain the OHL with minor
human constraints and urban if there are constructions near the cables, especially if these occur in the
central area.

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The density of vegetation is defined as the percentage of the surface within the region of interest
that is covered with vegetation above 2m. In the algorithm definition, one should account for the fact
that maintenance operations clear the area under the conductors as shown in Figure 7 and Figure 9;
therefore, vegetation occupation in the central and inner areas should be given different weights as
compared with outer areas where vegetation is less correlated with the electrical grid. The density
function should also account for the natural equivalent area of each tree: while some species grow trees
close in wetter areas, in drier ones, trees occur sparsely as they need an area to absorb water and soil
nutrients that is wider than its canopy. In the Portuguese coast, a fully occupied eucalyptus planted
forest has a maximum canopy occupation of about 60% of the area while in the south a fully
occupied cork oak forest has a canopy coverage that very rarely reaches 20%. Such ecological
characteristics are of maximum interest when considering relationships with stakeholders beyond the
electrical grid and how they perceive grid operation and maintenance.
The representation of the vegetation growth rate is an influence function quantifying the growth
rate in seven levels. This scheme groups trees by species, development stage and location, while
filtering out very specific intra-species and inter-species interactions using the concept of dominant
species. The accumulated evidence builds useful patterns to transfer knowledge between different
locations with similar environmental specifications.

Figure 4 Classification of vegetation sample: from the coast to the mountains

Figure 4 shows an example from a 220kV OHL with a length of 65km and 165 spans, that has

the left (western) end near Oporto, by the Portuguese west coast, and the right (eastern) end in the
mountains, near the Douro River. The bottom row represents the urban type: on the left there are many
urban spans (blue) on the outskirts of Oporto; going further east the OHL crosses another inhabited
area with lower occupancy (mixed spans in cyan are more frequent) and as the OHL goes to the
mountains, most spans are rural (colored green). The middle row represents density of vegetation,
where greener depicts lower density and redder depicts higher density. In the inhabited areas, trees are
rare and most spans have little or no vegetation at all. The density of vegetation increases as one travels
to the mountains. However, as the top row showing the growth rate suggests, the trees growing by the
coast, although fewer, are of higher concern since they grow fast (red and orange), while vegetation in
the mountains is of the slow growth type (yellow) or with maximum height up to 2m (green) that does
not affect grid operation: this is the region where vineyards for Port wine are grown.
The resulting severity function combines heterogeneous information into a space-time
referenced index: geographically, at the physical spans geographic location; and timely, at the time of
the inspection. It also accounts for the operation voltage level and reflects potential outages by
including vegetation growth rate information. For example, consider the severity of spans at easements
areas with poplars and oaks, which are at the same distance from the OHL at the time of the inspection.
By introducing information about the growth rate, the severities are numerically different; being the
severity of the span with poplars higher than the one with oaks, in spite of the similar present clearance.
Hence, the predictive nature of the proposed severity is useful for supporting selective maintenance
processes.
SELECTIVE MAINTENANCE AND INSPECTION

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Selective operations have evolved step-by-step since 2008. One of the first selectivity functions
are PoI severity classification within the clearance reports: a vegetation trimming team assigned top
priority deals only with most extreme cases but is aware of the lower severity PoI to act upon nearby
issues -, while scheduled maintenance teams visit the whole set of PoI still unresolved as the GPS files
depicting the report are designed to route teams according to severity.
The next step was taken by computing simple risk indexes from clearance measurements as
described in [5]. The method is summarized below with risk indexes in the horizontal axis and tower
number in the vertical axis. The vegetation risk index is computed for each span (Figure 5) and for 10span sequences (Figure 6); other smarter clustering could be used, such as sections between traction
towers or sequences of towers between roads or natural landmarks. On a 148 span OHL, vegetation
hazards are apparently scattered along the line (see Figure 5). However, aggregation in Figure 6
highlights that maintaining only 30 spans (about 20% of the line length) between towers 0 to 19 and
towers 39 to 49, the overall vegetation risk is reduced by 50%.

Figure 5 span-by-span vegetation risk index

Figure 6 10-span aggregated risk index

The evolution from this crude model included the analysis of the role of each OHL on the grid
topology which rates its criticality that depends on redundancy, the loads fed downstream, the system
balance risk, etc. and is defined per circuit. Combined with the severity associated to the vegetation
found at each span, ranked maintenance directions are proposed all substantiated on quantitative field
data.
A natural result of the knowledge acquired by the criticality+severity indices ranking achieved
is the correct assessment of the transmission grid reliability, the estimated remaining life of each asset
and maintenance optimization. The assignment of criticality levels of maintenance to all sections of its
overhead lines, and the different sections (sequences of spans) of the same line, will allow the
production of selective maintenance routines in critical locations that lead to a desired condition, thus
achieving the best assets status, given a minimum level of maintenance resources.
REN will implement this function to optimize its inspection schedule for OHL (through
differentiated periodicities), according to location, criticality and probability of failure. The function to
optimize is the binomial operating costs (including maintenance and inspections) / level of quality of
service [6]. Thereby, REN intends to obtain valuable elements enabling it to reset, in consonance, their
maintenance and inspection policies for overhead lines, focusing on methods that stand out from
commonly practiced in its scope, in order to implement an optimization strategy based on risk.
MAINTENANCE OF BIO-FUEL SECONDARY ROUTES
ROW Maintenance and Fuel Management

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The maintenance of transmission lines within Portuguese forest areas are of utmost importance,
requiring great care. The current legislation (since 1992) requires the landowners of the ROW, with
some restrictions, the obligation to support the ROW easement, through a fair compensation. Thus,
owners are required not to preserve plantations, or any kind of vegetation that may affect the operation
of the overhead line, at a maximum width of 45 meters, where you can cut or trim trees to ensure the
minimum safety distance. This kind of intervention is called 'ROW Maintenance'.
In 2006 took effect a new law decree, which led to the Defense of Forest Networks, who
materialize the restructuring of rural areas due to the national strategy for planning forest defense
against the scourge of forest fires, that every year devastate the flora and, by extension, the fauna of the
Portuguese territory. This statute foresees the requirement by REN to manage the bio-fuel in a route
corresponding to the central area plus a width range of not less than 10 meters to each side along the
OHL. These interventions (which are usually called of 'Fuel Management') have nothing in common
with those intended to maintain the safety distances for line operation (ROW Maintenance). The biofuel management includes logging (to keep a distance of 4 metres between canopies), the pruning and
cleanup of the terrain.
This program had a strong impact on the number of faults due to forest fires. By 2007 we verify
a direct correlation between the number of forest fires, burned area and the number of faults in
overhead lines of the Portuguese Transmission Grid (RNT), caused by forest fires. However from,
especially 2009, this correlation is no longer present in the same proportion, as can be seen in Figure 8.

Figure 7 Ourique Tunes Line

(150kV)

Figure 8 Number of forest fires, burned area

and number of faults in RNT, due to forest
fires.

Conversion of the protection ROW

The conversion of the protection ROW of a transmission line is the change in occupancy of the
existing forest species by eliminating stumps of felled trees and consequent reforestation with species
to fulfill the minimum safety distances between the conductors and vegetation. This avoids the
accumulation of biofuels, the misfit of the species to the season, the high densities of certain species
and monoculture, thereby reducing the risk of fire or vegetation fault. Thus REN introduced a program
of reforestation of the ROW, offering owners a set of species that depend essentially on soil conditions
and climate, the risk of forest fire and its compatibility in the presence of the line (down-sized and slow
growth). Until the end of 2012, were planted about 370 thousand new trees and 495 thousand more are
envisaged until 2017.

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This operation has the advantage of making the vegetation compatible with overhead line
environment, thus preventing the proliferation of fast growing species that affect the operation of the
RNT, reducing maintenance costs and decreasing the risk of forest fire, creating a strategic barrier to
the advance of the fire, according to the national strategy for fighting forest fires. On the other hand,
the landscape is enhanced, promoting at the same time, the diversity of plant species obtaining, also,
the land owners, a higher profitability in harmony with the transmission line.
CONCLUSIONS, FUTURE WORK
The paper shows how different actions contribute to improve the quality of service related to
vegetation and how they are now interacting to leverage each other and improve the efficiency of
maintenance.
Current developments are focused on the field validation of models: probability of failure
severity, criticality. Oddly enough, the high quality of service results in few incidents, which makes all
more difficult to validate models. Also, current ROW inspection data is considered as measured at the
time of inspection. To improve comparisons between inspections and measure grid performance
relative to standard conditions, current work deals with re-calculating the conductor catenaries to
estimate sag and hence clearance under standard operation conditions of current load and temperature.
The model being used is defined in [7]

Figure 9 - Reforestation of Batalha Lavos overhead line (400kV)

BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]

REN Quality of Services Reports and Annual Reports available at www.ren.pt

ASLMS description available at www.albatroz-eng.com/solutions/aslms_en.html
J. Gomes-Mota. Integrated, Flexible and Real Time Inspection of Overhead Lines (Power
Industry International, Vol. 2 Issue 1. 2008, pages 67-69).
J. Gomes-Mota, Unified Status Evaluation for Reliability Assessment of Over-Head Power
Grids CMDM2011 (Cigr SC B2), Bucharest, 2011.
J. Gomes-Mota, Miguel Ramos,A. Matos-Andr Geographical Information Tools for Overhead
Lines Preventive Maintenance, CIGR Session 42, Study Committee B2, Paris, 2008.

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[6]
[7]

L. Campos Pinto, J. Casaca, Criticality Indices for Lines and Substations, CMDM2011 (Cigr
SC A3), Bucharest, 2011.
Task Force B2.12.3, Sag Tension Calculation Methods for Overhead Lines, Working Group
B2.12, CIGR Technical Brochure TB324, Paris, France, 2007.