In a recent interview with APPA, Branndon Kelley, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Innovation and Chief Strategy Officer at AMP, detailed how AMP members will benefit from a program that provides streamlined access to Noteworthy AI's inspection platform through standardized terms and group buy pricing.
AMP, a wholesale power and services provider for municipal electric utilities, announced the partnership with Noteworthy AI in April.
Kelley discussed the program in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
Kelley noted that AMP has more than 130 members in nine states “and those are all shape and sizes. But the one thing that's in common with all of those is the fact that they need to provide reliable power and the health of the distribution system is one of those ways that they ensure that. Whether you're large or small, you have to make sure that your distribution system is taken care of.”
And regardless of a utility’s size, “that at times is a very labor intense situation — just even assessing and understanding what the health of your system is.”
At a more basic level, “even if you're smaller, sometimes just knowing what assets are out there, whether they're yours or third-party attachments, is very important,” he noted.
Using AI and the tools that Noteworthy AI offers allows AMP to “drive the system with visual inspection. We capture those images. We can take inventory, a GIS location of all those poles, as well as the assets that are attached to those poles.”
This can be done “with very little labor,” Kelley said and it “doesn't even really take someone that understands” poles and attachments. “It just takes the equipment on a vehicle that drives those routes. We do it in this way because of our members being all shapes and sizes that allows the lowest cost of entry.”
Taking advantage of the benefits of joint action and AMP’s joint procurement, the organization has developed a program that allows members to rent a camera, which is the largest cost of the initial start of the program. “We've purchased, as the joint action agency, cameras that allow our members to rent and then they temporarily can install those on an existing vehicle,” Kelley said.
Depending on a utility’s size, “they can contract a third party, including partnerships that we have or even our own staff, depending on the size, can go drive their community and provide or collect that information. At the end of the day, we're collecting that information; we're collecting where the poles are with the GPS coordinates; we're taking inventory on that pole; and then we go from there.”
AMP members “really start benefiting from this program immediately with the first drive, utilizing not only the fact that we've built this wrapper of a program around that allows us to deliver this technology, but the fact that the tool itself has such powerful insights and immediate information that can allow them to start taking action to better manage and make their system more reliable.”
He said that since the program has kicked off some communities are already detecting things like transformer corrosion, split poles or damaged poles.
“I cannot say enough good things about the onboarding process with Noteworthy. They met us where they needed to. They came out, they went and drove one of our small communities as a pilot,” Kelley said.
“We immediately could see what the power of this was because...a few of the folks that work for me sat in the vehicle while the car was being driven and the data was being collected in real time and they were watching it on the laptop and they were seeing the results.”
