thanks for showing up um I'm excited to be here uh my name is Thiago carvalo I'm the BP of utilities at Aid Dash um I'm Kristen Bridges I work for Alabama Power all right good afternoon uh Bert Stewart National Grid 2020 we had some serious headwinds at National Grid specifically our massachusett jurisdiction I would say we probably had the worst s safety performance likely in the company's history we just experienced a number of back to back to back storms so of course our our company is like we can't do this anymore right we got to do something a little different in conjunction with that we were also deferring miles and circuits off our work plan because our costs were increasing at Double Digit percentage rates so as a result we start taking least risk circuits off the work plan essentially kicking the can down the road and we're doing that three years almost four years on a row so obviously that is not sustainable to run a program in Alabama it it's a great place but we have it's really really warm we've got a lot of warm water vapor from the Gulf of Mexico we've got a really long growing season in Alabama um and a lot of biodiversity so we were just con constantly challenged by a lot of the same things that Bert mentioned but it was further complicated because we couldn't come up with a good average cycle um what worked in the northern part of our service territory wouldn't necessarily be ideal for the southern part of our service territory so we were really needing a way to kind of get a handle on that and and prioritize things similar to what what Bert described traditionally we are on a time-based uh cycle approach for our our distribution system uh and pretty much for our transission transmission system as well very mature system I think we have 40 50 years of cycle-based approach in the York uh 15 20 years cycle based approach in Massachusetts Forward Thinking knowing that you know a contractor R are going to increase climate change is going to have impacts and things of that nature so hence why National Grid 3 four years ago made the change to instead of a Time based approach condition based approach technology ended up being condition based approach and we reached out to a number of different vendors AI Dash being one of them and the result was we did a proof of concept and usually when we apply a proof of concept to our business it's it's small scale right it's a snippet our proof of concept we did with AI Dash in 2020 it was uh August to October three-month proof of concept and the end result of of that concept proof of concept was an actionable work plan the following fiscal year on our entire system in Massachusetts and the end result was was was certainly positive we're we're in a good spot today uh really wanted to see how the the the system would perform how those metrics would perform and looking at our tree related indices and outages and how that translates to the overall system performance the company was fully supportive put together uh it Engineers for us they put together project managers for us I don't think everybody has that luxury and and not only that we also brought in a Consultant Group to help us with that as well to really lay out things such as uh MVPs or minimum viable products things that were minimum to to move forward with a condition based approach what I what I like about the condition-based approach right it's it's having that snapshot of the system understanding what the condition of the system is right and identifying where you got to do the work because on a Time based approach frankly you're prudent stuff you don't need to prune right the other thing too is I'll mention is that early on we were actually doing less miles Kristen mentioned some some savings by doing less miles and the first year two years we were actually doing less miles um the last three years so this current fiscal year we're finishing right now the next two we actually ran in in the ivms platform solution we ran unconstrained we want to levelize our workload to maintain consistency in our tree crew resources right doing less is great we are seeing some benefits in sing safety um the the amount of tree incidents that we've reductions that we're seeing it's equating to about a 3% Improvement on our safety and safy metrics at the system level um but nonetheless it's still moving the needle in in the right direction for us so I I mentioned we actually went out with a multi-year approach using ivms to identify work plans uh traditionally we've always been a year in advance give our vendors the work plan the following a April they started this year we again it's not a New Concept but National Grid it's again a little bit of a culture shift putting out a multi-year work plan to bid and we just awarded that with regard to kpis I took a conservative approach I said listen you can tell me I can do less miles and maintain my Benchmark reliability performance that's a win to me right um we're beating that of course right we're doing better than that our Benchmark uh we're improving our reliability metrics uh from a bench perspective so we didn't do it just from a cost perspective really to me it's it's about serving the customer making sure their lights stay on and they're you know they don't see those interruptions as much that's really my goal we've traditionally always had a cycle-based approach but due to constraints really needed a way to prioritize where our resources were going so about 2018 we started with uh what we called a feeder prioritization Matrix where we took into account um things like number of customers impacted and and VM related reliability stats and uh years since last trim and and sort of drove out a prioritization so we could we could allocate our resources most effectively and that was helpful but you know reliability is a lagging indicator it's when when your customers's already been impacted and we wanted we just wanted to get better so so we started looking into okay how can we know how can we do true condition based have a true condition based VM program and we need to know what the conditions are out on our whole system at at the time so we started looking into what technology and solutions were out there there's a lot out there and honestly they all have upsides and there's some limitations to all of them but we really assessed it with okay what where are we now what are our needs um and what fits that best we actually took the time to undertake two pilots we concluded those Pilots last year and that's when we decided we what fit Us best was a satellite based tool we just kind of completed the process of creating our plans for 2024 and we started with what we've been doing for the past 5 years and did the normal prioritization but when we brought in the satellite insights into that process we've learned that we could actually move it was like 114 segments out of our plan we had to replace them with 51 segments but it was a reduction in what needed to be trimmed of 200 miles that we we wouldn't have necessarily known if we didn't have that field condition Insight we were strictly feeder based we were breaker to end of line and um we've now gone to a segment based program so we're we're hitting the worst segments on our system it's really exciting to see our arborist get excited about incorporating technology and new ways of thinking about how we do what we do we understand that really to get the full benefit we're looking for we're going to have to go through a couple of iterations of scans um because we're really looking to get that that sort of custom growth rate by segment and the reason that's important is I I need to be able to go and and tell the people who who give us the money hey I think in year 2026 we're going to need this much money to do what's going to be due that year and similar to levelize you know how can we levelize and keep resources stable and just try to prove the overall customer experience